There is a series of Fluid Mechanics movies (totally 25 movies) covering nearly all the fundamental phenomena of fluid motions, prepared under the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films (NCFMF) of USA since about 50 years ago. Several basic films have been selected as supplementary materials for the course “Fundamental of Fluid Dynamics (流體力學導論),” offered regularly by the Institute of Applied Mechanics. It is strongly believed that it would be beneficial for a student of fluid mechanics for starting her/his research if she/he can understand all the materials of the whole series of the movies. In my opinion, it is a short cut for exposing many interesting idea and many aspects of fluid mechanics to the students through this informal course. I think it is worth trying to offering such an informal course as more and more students are participating interdisciplinary research, who need to have a board knowledge, but not necessary in detail at this moment, of fluid mechanics. The aim of this course is to provide such a chance for a student, so that she/he can grasp the essence of materials more easily and smoothly, through the help of the lecturer. The three-credit course is arranged as follows. A selected topic or two topics (as indicated in the course schedule below) is discussed for a week. The lecturer will illustrate the fundamental of the topic in the first hour, the students and the lecturer will watch the movie(s) together in the second hour, and the lecturer will guide a discussion with the students in the third hour. It is encouraged that the students should enroll actively in the discussion.
Of course, a serious student who is major in fluid mechanics should take various formal and classical fluid mechanics courses, such as viscous flow, turbulence, compressible flow, potential flow, wave in fluids, rarefied fluid dynamics, stability of fluid motion, geophysical fluid dynamics, physiological fluid mechanics, two-phase flows, and etc, beside this course.