A Brief on Tensor Analysis

When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North American Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical En­ gineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch a plane in flight-especially in a tum-without imaging it bristling with vec­ tors. Near the end of the course the professor showed that, if an airplane is treated as a rigid body, there arises a myste