  The swimming trajectories of self-propelled organisms or synthetic devices in
a viscous fluid can be altered by hydrodynamic interactions with nearby
boundaries. We explore a multipole description of swimming bodies and provide a
general framework for studying the fluid-mediated modifications to swimming
trajectories. The validity of the far-field description is probed for a
selection of model swimmers of varying geometry and propulsive activity by
comparison with full numerical simulations. The reduced model is then used to
deliver simple but accurate predictions of hydrodynamically generated wall
attraction and pitching dynamics, and may help to explain a number of
experimental results.
