Hyperbolic Conservation Laws in Continuum Physics

The seeds of Continuum Physics were planted with the works of the natural philosophers of the eighteenth century, most notably Euler; by the mid-nineteenth century, the trees were fully grown and ready to yield fruit. It was in this envi­ ronment that the study of gas dynamics gave birth to the theory of quasilinear hyperbolic systems in divergence form, commonly called "hyperbolic conserva­ tion laws"; and these two subjects have been traveling hand-in-hand over the past one hundred and fifty y