Continuum Mechanics Through The Twentieth Century

This overview of the development of continuum mechanics throughout the twentieth century is unique and ambitious. Utilizing a historical perspective, it combines an exposition on the technical progress made in the field and a marked interest in the role played by remarkable individuals and scientific schools and institutions on a rapidly evolving social background. It underlines the newly raised technical questions and their answers, and the ongoing reflections on the bases of continuum mechanics associated, or in competition, with other branches of the physical sciences, including thermodynamics. The emphasis is placed on the development of a more realistic modeling of deformable solids and the exploitation of new mathematical tools. The book presents a balanced appraisal of advances made in various parts of the world. The author contributes his technical expertise, personal recollections, and international experience to this general overview, which is very informative albeit concise.

Mixing scientific, historic and socio-economic vision, this unique book complements two previously published volumes on the history of continuum mechanics from this distinguished author. In this volume, Gérard A. Maugin looks at the period from the renaissance to the twentieth century and he includes an appraisal of the ever enduring competition between molecular and continuum modelling views. Chapters trace early works in hydraulics and fluid mechanics not covered in the other volumes and the author investigates experimental approaches, essentially before the introduction of a true concept of stress tensor. The treatment of such topics as the viscoelasticity of solids and plasticity, fracture theory, and the role of geometry as a cornerstone of the field, are all explored. Readers will find a kind of socio-historical appraisal of the seminal contributions by our direct masters in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis of the teaching and research texts by Duhem, Poincaré and Hilbert on continuum mechanics is key: these provide the most valuable documentary basis on which a revival of continuum mechanics and its formalization were offered in the late twentieth century. Altogether, the three volumes offer a generous conspectus of the developments of continuum mechanics between the sixteenth century and the dawn of the twenty-first century. Mechanical engineers, applied mathematicians and physicists alike will all be interested in this work which appeals to all curious scientists for whom continuum mechanics as a vividly evolving science still has its own mysteries.

Conceived as a series of more or less autonomous essays, the present book critically exposes the initial developments of continuum thermo-mechanics in a post Newtonian period extending from the creative works of the Bernoullis to the First World war, i.e., roughly during first the “Age of reason” and next the “Birth of the modern world”. The emphasis is rightly placed on the original contributions from the “Continental” scientists (the Bernoulli family, Euler, d’Alembert, Lagrange, Cauchy, Piola, Duhamel, Neumann, Clebsch, Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Saint-Venant, Boussinesq, the Cosserat brothers, Caratheodory) in competition with their British peers (Green, Kelvin, Stokes, Maxwell, Rayleigh, Love,..). It underlines the main breakthroughs as well as the secondary ones. It highlights the role of scientists who left essential prints in this history of scientific ideas. The book shows how the formidable developments that blossomed in the twentieth century (and perused in a previous book of the author in the same Springer Series: “Continuum Mechanics through the Twentieth Century”, Springer 2013) found rich compost in the constructive foundational achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The pre-WWI situation is well summarized by a thorough analysis of treatises (Appell, Hellinger) published at that time. English translations by the author of most critical texts in French or German are given to the benefit of the readers.

Continuum mechanics studies the foundations of deformable body mechanics from a mathematical perspective. It also acts as a base upon which other applied areas such as solid mechanics and fluid mechanics are developed. This book discusses some important topics, which have come into prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century, such as material symmetry, frame-indifference and thermomechanics. The study begins with the necessary mathematical background in the form of an introduction to tensor analysis followed by a discussion on kinematics, which deals with purely geometrical notions such as strain and rate of deformation. Moving on to derivation of the governing equations, the book also presents applications in the areas of linear and nonlinear elasticity. In addition, the volume also provides a mathematical explanation to the axioms and laws of deformable body mechanics, and its various applications in the field of solid mechanics.

Through his voluminous and in?uential writings, editorial activities, organi- tional leadership, intellectual acumen, and strong sense of history, Clifford - brose Truesdell III (1919–2000) was the main architect for the renaissance of - tional continuum mechanics since the middle of the twentieth century. The present collection of 42 essays and research papers pays tribute to this man of mathematics, science, and natural philosophy as well as to his legacy. The ?rst ?ve essays by B. D. Coleman, E. Giusti, W. Noll, J. Serrin, and D. Speiser were texts of addresses given by their authors at the Meeting in memory of Clifford Truesdell, which was held in Pisa in November 2000. In these essays the reader will ?nd personal reminiscences of Clifford Truesdell the man and of some of his activities as scientist, author, editor, historian of exact sciences, and principal founding member of the Society for Natural Philosophy. The bulk of the collection comprises 37 research papers which bear witness to the Truesdellian legacy. These papers cover a wide range of topics; what ties them together is the rational spirit. Clifford Truesdell, in his address upon receipt of a Birkhoff Prize in 1978, put the essence of modern continuum mechanics succinctly as “conceptual analysis, analysis not in the sense of the technical term but in the root meaning: logical criticism, dissection, and creative scrutiny.

Through several centuries there has been a lively interaction between mathematics and mechanics. On the one side, mechanics has used mathemat ics to formulate the basic laws and to apply them to a host of problems that call for the quantitative prediction of the consequences of some action. On the other side, the needs of mechanics have stimulated the development of mathematical concepts. Differential calculus grew out of the needs of Newtonian dynamics; vector algebra was developed as a means . to describe force systems; vector analysis, to study velocity fields and force fields; and the calcul~s of variations has evolved from the energy principles of mechan ics. In recent times the theory of tensors has attracted the attention of the mechanics people. Its very name indicates its origin in the theory of elasticity. For a long time little use has been made of it in this area, but in the last decade its usefulness in the mechanics of continuous media has been widely recognized. While the undergraduate textbook literature in this country was becoming "vectorized" (lagging almost half a century behind the development in Europe), books dealing with various aspects of continuum mechanics took to tensors like fish to water. Since many authors were not sure whether their readers were sufficiently familiar with tensors~ they either added' a chapter on tensors or wrote a separate book on the subject.

This book offers a broad overview of the potential of continuum mechanics to describe a wide range of macroscopic phenomena in real-world problems. Building on the fundamentals presented in the authors’ previous book, Continuum Mechanics using Mathematica®, this new work explores interesting models of continuum mechanics, with an emphasis on exploring the flexibility of their applications in a wide variety of fields.

This book presents an introduction into the entire science of Continuum Mechanics in three parts. The presentation is modern and comprehensive. Its introduction into tensors is very gentle. The book contains many examples and exercises, and is intended for scientists, practitioners and students of mechanics.