What does it mean to swim? Well, it means simply that you are in some liquid and are allowed to deform your body in some manner. Move it around and move it back. Of course, you choose some kind of cyclic deformation because you want to keep swimming, and it doesn’t do any good to use a motion that goes to zero asymptotically.

Purcell E. (1977) Life at Low Reynolds Number

http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.10903

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