Bücher der Reihe Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy

This book is an introduction to the study of methods of obtaining generating functions. Weisner's group-theoretic method is explained in detail in Chapter II and is further illustrated in Chapter III. His method of obtaining generating functions is only one of these results.

Theoretical researches in general relativity and observational data from galactic astronomy combine in this volume in contributions to one of the oldest questions of natural philosophy: Is the structure of the physical world more adequately described by a continuous or a discrete mode of representation?

This is the second of four volumes on the Navier-Stokes equations, specifically on Nonlinear Stationary Problems. The work is an up-to-date and detailed investigation of these problems for motions in domains of different types: bounded, exterior and domain with noncompact boundaries.

The field equations of ordinary thermodynamics are parabolic while extended thermodynamics is governed by hyperbolic systems. The main ingredients of extended thermodynamics are * field equations of balance type, * constitutive quantities depending on the present local state and * entropy as a concave function of the state variables.

This book proposes a new general setting for theories of bodies with microstructure when they are described within the scheme of the con tinuum: besides the usual fields of classical thermomechanics (dis placement, stress, temperature, etc.) some new fields enter the picture (order parameters, microstress, etc.).

In this book I present, in a systematic form, some local theorems on existence, uniqueness, and analytic dependence on the load, which I have recently obtained for some types of boundary value problems of finite elasticity.

It was to be a short work on the energy theory of stability and if I had stuck to that I would have finished the writing many years ago. I am grateful to Truesdell, not so much for the invitation to spend endless hours of writing and erasing, but for the generous way he has supported my efforts and encouraged me to higher standards of good work.

However, general theories having a thermodynamic basis, including heat conduction and constitutive equations, did not appear in general relativity until about 1955 for fluids and appeared only after 1960 for elastic or more general finitely deformed materials.