📚 Waves

Motion moving through stuff: water swell and breakers, and the physics that treats sound and light as the same trick.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject waves in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Waves, a mathematical account of the common types of wave motion	Charles Coulson	1941	15
	The Physics of Vibrations and Waves	H. J. Pain	1968	15
	The theory of sound	Rayleigh, John William Strutt Baron	1877	12
	Fundamental university physics	Marcelo Alonso	1967	10
	Interactive Science	Don Buckley	2010	9
	Wave mechanics	H. T. Flint	1929	8
	Numerical modeling of water waves	Charles L. Mader	1988	8
	Beaches and coasts	Cuchlaine A. M. King	1959	7
	Introduction to the Physics of Waves	Tim Freegarde	2012	7
	Introduction to Vibrations and Waves	H. John Pain	2015	7
	Underwater explosions	R. H. Cole	1948	6
	Vibrations and waves	George C. King	2009	6
	Nonlinear dispersive waves	Mark J. Ablowitz	2011	6
	Oceanographical engineering	Robert L. Wiegel	1964	5
	Physics of waves	William C. Elmore	1969	5
	Wave propagation and scattering in random media	Akira Ishimaru	1978	5
	Wind waves at sea, breakers and surf	Henry Bryant Bigelow	1947	4
	Vibrations and waves	A. P. French	1971	4
	A Student's Guide to Waves	Daniel Fleisch	2015	4
	Waves and Optics	Harish Parthasarathy	2021	4
	Vibrations and waves in physics	Iain G. Main	1978	3
	Water Wave Mechanics for Engineers and Scientists	Robert G. Dean	1984	3
	Introduction to wave phenomena	Akira Hirose	1985	3
	Waves and ripples in water, air, and aether	Fleming, J. A. Sir	1912	2
	Waves in fluids	Lighthill, M. J. Sir.	1978	2
	Wave physics	Robert Eugene Ian Newton	1990	2
	Soils and waves	J. Carlos Santamarina	2001	2
	Similarities in Wave Behavior	John N. Shive	1961	1
	Fundamentals of waves & oscillations	K. Uno Ingard	1988	1
	Waves and Fields in Inhomogenous Media (IEEE Press Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory)	Weng Cho Chew	1999	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.