The Tradition of Elasticity

Abstract

The theory of elasticity was created by the mathematicians James Bernoulli, Euler, and Cauchy. For a long time it was a favorite subject of mathematicians and was regularly taught in mathematics departments. In this century both Hadamard and Hilbert lectured upon it, as had Poincaré and many others in the last. Of the mathematicians of that time who are best known for their work in what is now called “pure” mathematics, we may collect a long list naming those who made at least one important addition to elasticity: Beltrami, Betti, Birkhoff, Cesàro, Christoffel, Clebsch, Fredholm, Hadamard, Korn, Lamé, Levi-Civita, Lipschitz, Morera, Volterra, Weingarten, Weyl. To these we may add some distinguished Italian mathematicians who specialized in elasticity: Almansi, Cerruti, [Donati], Lauricella, Piola, Signorini, Somigliana, Tedone, as well as those great British mathematicians whose main interest lay in physics: Green, Kelvin, Stokes, and Maxwell.