Since the first edition of this book was published, there have been major improve- ™ ™ ments in symbolic mathematical languages such as Maple and Mathematica and this has opened up the possibility of solving considerably more complex and hence interesting and realistic elasticity problems as classroomexamples. It also enables the student to focus on the formulation of the problem (e. g. the appropriate governing equations and boundary conditions) rather than on the algebraic manipulations, with a consequent improvement in insight into the subject and in motivation. During the past 10 years I have developed files in Maple and Mathematica to facilitate this p- cess, notably electronic versions of the Tables in the present Chapters 19 and 20 and of the recurrence relations for generating spherical harmonics. One purpose of this new edition is to make this electronic material available to the reader through the Kluwer website www. elasticity. org. I hope that readers will make use of this resource and report back to me any aspects of the electronic material that could benefit from improvement or extension. Some hints about the use of this material are contained in Appendix A. Those who have never used Maple or Mathematica will find that it takes only a few hours of trial and error to learn how to write programs to solve boundary value problems in elasticity.
