Historical document

Hermann Hankel’s “On the general theory of motion of fluids”

An essay including an English translation of the complete Preisschrift from 1861^★

INAF, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, via Osservatorio, 30, 10025 Pino Torinese, Italy
² Institut für Theoretische Physik, University of Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 16, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
³ Department of Physics, Israel Institute of Technology – Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel

^a e-mail: barbara.villone@inaf.it

Received: 5 July 2017
Received in final form: 6 October 2017
Published online: 15 December 2017

Abstract

The present is a companion paper to “A contemporary look at Hermann Hankel’s 1861 pioneering work on Lagrangian fluid dynamics” by Frisch, Grimberg and Villone [Eur. Phys. J. H 42, 537–556 (2017)]. Here we present the English translation of the 1861 prize manuscript from Göttingen University “Zur allgemeinen Theorie der Bewegung der Flüssigkeiten” (On the general theory of the motion of the fluids) of Hermann Hankel (1839–1873), which was originally submitted in Latin and then translated into German by the Author for publication. We also provide the English translation of two important reports on the manuscript, one written by Bernhard Riemann and the other by Wilhelm Eduard Weber during the assessment process for the prize. Finally, we give a short biography of Hermann Hankel with his complete bibliography.