Modern Continuum Mechanics in Adolescence (1962)

Abstract

That reprinting of this work is now called for, indicates a great change in circumstances against the time when it was written. When, in 1946, I first began to study the foundations of continuum mechanics, within a few months I had set the whole field in order, to my own satisfaction. I quickly wrote and submitted to an international meeting an expository memoir, which was rejected. In view of the quality of papers accepted by the same meeting, I was naive enough to be astonished as well as disappointed, and I sent the manuscript for criticism to a number of experts. Most of these did not deign to acknowledge it or to reply, but two did. Mr. Friedrichs told me I had underestimated the work of earlier authors. Since my information concerning it was drawn from reputable textbooks, I turned, somewhat taken aback, to the sources they cited, and then to the sources cited by those sources, and so on, until within a year I found out how right he was and how little I had seen of the real issues faced by the great natural philosophers one and two centuries ago. During this period I first saw Mr. Reiner’s papers of 1945 and 1948. On 23 December 1948 Mr. V. Mises asked me to write a general exposition of recent theories of deformable masses for a volume he was editing. I set to work at once and completed the article, severely condensed so as to keep within twice the space allowed, at the appointed time; on 23 May 1949 Mr. v. Mises acknowledged receipt of the final manuscript. I had first gotten in touch with Mr. Rivlin in January, although I did not master his work in time for it to assert the influence it ought have had upon the structure of the article, my expositions of it being of the nature of insertions and appendices to the original plan.