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.

This volume documents a conference celebrating Robert Finn's 70th birthday. The introduction discusses Finn's career, and highlights his contributions to the field of mathematics and its applications. The following papers cover advances in geometric analysis and continuum mechanics.

This volume is a rigorous cross-disciplinary theoretical treatment of electromechanical and magnetomechanical interactions in elastic solids. Using the modern style of continuum thermomechanics (but without excessive formalism) it starts from basic principles of mechanics and electromagnetism, and goes on to unify these two fields in a common framework. It treats linear and nonlinear static and dynamic problems in a variety of elastic solids such as piezoelectrics, electricity conductors, ferromagnets, ferroelectrics, ionic crystals and ceramics. Chapters 1-3 are introductory, describing the essential properties of electromagnetic solids, the essentials of the thermomechanics of continua, and the general equations that govern the electrodynamics of nonlinear continua in the nonrelativistic framework (e.g. Maxwell's equations, the fundamental balance laws of continuum mechanics, basic thermodynamical inequalities for electromagnetic continua, jump relations for studying the propagation of shock waves, nonlinear constitutive equations for large classes of materials).The remainder of the text presents in detail special cases, applications, solved problems, and more complex schemes of electromagnetic matter. Chapters 4 and 5 examine material schemes whose description relies on the above-mentioned equations. Chapters 6 and 7 are more advanced, reporting on recent progress in the field.Suitable for graduate teaching, the volume will also be useful to research workers and engineers in the field of electromagnetomechanical interactions, and to those interested in the basic principles, mathematical developments and applications of electroelasticity and magnetoelasticity in a variety of solid materials, such as crystals, polycrystals, compounds and alloys.