Gregory Kozyreff – författare

The world around us, natural or man-made, is built and held together by solid materials. Understanding their behaviour is the task of solid mechanics, which is in turn applied to many areas, from earthquake mechanics to industry, construction to biomechanics. The variety of materials (metals, rocks, glasses, sand, flesh and bone) and their properties (porosity, viscosity, elasticity, plasticity) is reflected by the concepts and techniques needed to understand them: a rich mixture of mathematics, physics and experiment. These are all combined in this unique book, based on years of experience in research and teaching. Starting from the simplest situations, models of increasing sophistication are derived and applied. The emphasis is on problem-solving and building intuition, rather than a technical presentation of theory. The text is complemented by over 100 carefully-chosen exercises, making this an ideal companion for students taking advanced courses, or those undertaking research in this or related disciplines.

Theoretical research sometimes resembles panning for gold: the first to 'discover' a given subject can take their pick of any bold simplifying assumptions and mine all the good nuggets before the rest of us join in. Still, some beautiful exact results may lie just below the surface. Every now and then, they are uncovered through mathematical tours de force. Short of extraordinary mathematical skills, there is, fortunately, a third way towards successful analytical investigations: Asymptotics - the craft of treating limiting cases. This book is addressed to scientists and engineers from Masters level up who want to enrich their numerical investigations with analytical results. It provides strategies for obtaining approximate results when parameters become small or large. Built round a large number of examples, it demonstrates how the techniques apply to a variety of problems, by considering applications from areas as diverse as quantum mechanics, elasticity, electromagnetism and population dynamics.