Bücher von James G. Simmonds

There are three changes in the second edition. First, with the help of readers and colleagues-thanks to all-I have corrected typographical errors and made minor changes in substance and style. Second, I have added a fewmore Exercises,especially at the end ofChapter4.Third, I have appended a section on Differential Geometry, the essential mathematical tool in the study of two-dimensional structural shells and four-dimensional general relativity. JAMES G. SIMMONDS vii Preface to the First Edition When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North Ameri­ can Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical Engineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch a plane in flight-especially in a turn-without imaging it bristling with vec­ tors. Near the end of the course the professor showed that, if an airplane is treated as a rigid body, there arises a mysterious collection of rather simple­ looking integrals called the components of the moment of inertia tensor.

In this text which gradually develops the tools for formulating and manipulating the field equations of Continuum Mechanics, the mathematics of tensor analysis is introduced in four, well-separated stages, and the physical interpretation and application of vectors and tensors are stressed throughout.