New Releases by Michael Sherman

This collection documents the attempt by the Vermont Historical Society to publish a one-volume history of Vermont made up of chapters contributed by several Vermont historians. It includes correspondence between Vermont Historical Society directors Weston Cate Jr. and Michael Sherman, the authors of various chapters, and the general editor, H. Nicholas Mueller. Drafts of chapters one to four, seven to nine, and eleven through fourteen are included, as are contracts, bibliographies, exploratory material relating to the design of the volume, and papers of the general editor. There are no drafts of chapters five, six or ten, but there is correspondence concerning chapters six and ten. The collection also includes a DOS computer disk with the final text of completed chapters.

The classical Rayleigh thermal stability problem of an infinite horizontal fluid layer heated from below is extended to the case of a fluid, confined within a rigid sphere whose wall is nonuniformly heated. The temperature distribution on the wall is specified so that a constant temperature gradient is established in the direction of the body force acting on the fluid (''heated from below''). Two different variational principles are presented, each equivalent to the eigenvalue problem for the critical Rayleigh number (the stability criterion). These principles form the basis for two approximate methods of determining upper bounds to the critical Rayleigh number. The critical Rayleigh number obtained is 16,132 (based on a unit diameter) which is almost ten times greater than that of the horizontal-layer configuration (based on a unit height). The results are compared with a previously published analysis and are found to be 10 percent lower. (Author).