I love tensors

At the request of a friend, I've recently begun to review some notes I prepared in the mid 1990's, when I was trying to understand some thin film cracking problems at the semiconductor company where I was employed. Although I've hardly thought about the subject since I retired (in 1997), looking at those notes immediately brought back my fascination with elasticity theory.

My love of tensors goes back to my graduate school days, and the study of special relativity and fluid mechanics. The texts that I really bonded with were in the incomparable theoretical physics series by Landau and Lifshitz, published in the 1950's and 60's, but still available, I think. I was equally inspired by the work of Clifford Truesdell in continuum mechanics, which I found in a handbook published in 1960, called the Handbuch der Physik (don't worry, he wrote in English).

Elasticity theory appeals to me because it requires the use of tensors to make sense out of it, and I would love to try to explain some of the concepts in a simple and straightforward way. That's what I plan to do with this blog.