Developed from a classic Notre Dame undergraduate course on the study of the motion of bodies, this volume stresses the history of science as well as the relevant physics and mathematics. Starting with ancient Greek celestial mechanics, topics include the Keplerian Revolution, displacement and kinematics, the special theory of relativity, and much more. 2013 edition.
Available for the first time in English, this two-volume course on theoretical and applied mechanics has been honed over decades by leading scientists and teachers, and is a primary teaching resource for engineering and maths students at St. Petersburg University. The course addresses classical branches of theoretical mechanics (Vol. 1), along with a wide range of advanced topics, special problems and applications (Vol. 2). This first volume of the textbook contains the parts “Kinematics” and “Dynamics”. The part “Kinematics” presents in detail the theory of curvilinear coordinates which is actively used in the part “Dynamics”, in particular, in the theory of constrained motion and variational principles in mechanics. For describing the motion of a system of particles, the notion of a Hertz representative point is used, and the notion of a tangent space is applied to investigate the motion of arbitrary mechanical systems. In the final chapters Hamilton-Jacobi theory is applied for the integration of equations of motion, and the elements of special relativity theory are presented. This textbook is aimed at students in mathematics and mechanics and at post-graduates and researchers in analytical mechanics.
1 We search the concepts and methods ) of the theory of deformable sonds from GALILEO to LAGRANGE. Neither of them achieved much in our subject, but their works serve as 2 termini: With GALILEO's Discorsi in 1638 our matter begins ) (for this is the history of mathematical theory), while LAGRANGE's Mechanique Analitique closed the mechanics of 1) There are three major historical works that bear on our subject. The first is A history of the theory of elasticity and of the strength of materials by I. ToDHUNTER, "edited and completed" by K. PEARSON, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1886. Unfortunately it is necessary to give warning that this book fails to meet the standard set by the histories ToDHUNTER lived to finish. Much of what ToDHUNTER left seems to be rather the rough notes for a book than the book itself; the parts due to PEARSON are fortunately distinguished by square brackets. Researches prior to 1800 are disposed of in the first chapter, 79 pages long and almost entirely the work of PEARSON; as frontispiece to a work whose title restricts it to theory he saw fit to supply a possibly original pen drawing entitled "Rupture. Sur faces of Cast-Iron".
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a "philosophical mechanics." Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve "the problem of bodies," they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.
This book deploys the mathematical axioms of modern rational mechanics to understand minds as mechanical systems that exhibit actual, not metaphorical, forces, inertia, and motion. Using precise mental models developed in artificial intelligence the author analyzes motivation, attention, reasoning, learning, and communication in mechanical terms. These analyses provide psychology and economics with new characterizations of bounded rationality; provide mechanics with new types of materials exhibiting the constitutive kinematic and dynamic properties characteristic of different kinds of minds; and provide philosophy with a rigorous theory of hybrid systems combining discrete and continuous mechanical quantities. The resulting mechanical reintegration of the physical sciences that characterize human bodies and the mental sciences that characterize human minds opens traditional philosophical and modern computational questions to new paths of technical analysis.
This book presents a history of differential equations, both ordinary and partial, as well as the calculus of variations, from the origins of the subjects to around 1900. Topics treated include the wave equation in the hands of d’Alembert and Euler; Fourier’s solutions to the heat equation and the contribution of Kovalevskaya; the work of Euler, Gauss, Kummer, Riemann, and Poincaré on the hypergeometric equation; Green’s functions, the Dirichlet principle, and Schwarz’s solution of the Dirichlet problem; minimal surfaces; the telegraphists’ equation and Thomson’s successful design of the trans-Atlantic cable; Riemann’s paper on shock waves; the geometrical interpretation of mechanics; and aspects of the study of the calculus of variations from the problems of the catenary and the brachistochrone to attempts at a rigorous theory by Weierstrass, Kneser, and Hilbert. Three final chapters look at how the theory of partial differential equations stood around 1900, as they were treated by Picard and Hadamard. There are also extensive, new translations of original papers by Cauchy, Riemann, Schwarz, Darboux, and Picard. The first book to cover the history of differential equations and the calculus of variations in such breadth and detail, it will appeal to anyone with an interest in the field. Beyond secondary school mathematics and physics, a course in mathematical analysis is the only prerequisite to fully appreciate its contents. Based on a course for third-year university students, the book contains numerous historical and mathematical exercises, offers extensive advice to the student on how to write essays, and can easily be used in whole or in part as a course in the history of mathematics. Several appendices help make the book self-contained and suitable for self-study.
German scholars, against odds now not only forgotten but also hard to imagine, were striving to revivify the life of the mind which the mental and physical barbarity preached and practised by the -isms and -acies of 1933-1946 had all but eradicated. Thinking that among the disciples of these elders, restorers rather than progressives, I might find a student or two who would wish to master new mathematics but grasp it and use it with the wholeness of earlier times, in 1952 I wrote to Mr. HAMEL, one of the few then remaining mathematicians from the classical mould, to ask him to name some young men fit to study for the doc torate in The Graduate Institute for Applied Mathematics at Indiana University, flourishing at that time though soon to be destroyed by the jealous ambition of the local, stereotyped pure. Having just retired from the Technische Universitat in Charlottenburg, he passed my inquiry on to Mr. SZABO, in whose institute there NOLL was then an assistant. Although Mr.
