Leonid I. Manevitch - Böcker

The main features of this volume are: 1) It is devoted to the basic principles of asymptotics and their applications; 2) It presents both traditional approaches as well as less widely used and new approaches such as one- and two-point Pade Approximants, constitutive equations, methods of boundary perturbations, etc.; 3) A general introduction to the subject suitable for non-specialists. Compared with other published books in the field the authors have paid special attention to examples and the discussion of results rather than burying them in formalism, in notation and in technical details. Audience: Researchers in mechanics, physics and applied mathematics as well as in engineering. Graduate students and even high school students can benefit from reading the book, which does not require any scientific knowledge of mathematics and physics.

Asymptotic methods belong to the, perhaps, most romantic area of modern mathematics. They are widely known and have been used in me­ chanics, physics and other exact sciences for many, many decades. But more than this, asymptotic ideas are found in all branches of human knowledge, indeed in all areas of life. In this broader context they have not and perhaps cannot be fully formalized. However, they are mar­ velous, they leave room for fantasy, guesses and intuition; they bring us very near to the border of the realm of art. Many books have been written and published about asymptotic meth­ ods. Most of them presume a mathematically sophisticated reader. The authors here attempt to describe asymptotic methods on a more accessi­ ble level, hoping to address a wider range of readers. They have avoided the extreme of banishing formulae entirely, as done in some popular science books that attempt to describe mathematical methods with no mathematics. This is impossible (and not wise). Rather, the authors have tried to keep the mathematics at a moderate level. At the same time, using simple examples, they think they have been able to illustrate all the key ideas of asymptotic methods and approaches, to depict in de­ tail the results of their application to various branches of knowledg- from astronomy, mechanics, and physics to biology, psychology and art. The book is supplemented by several appendices, one of which con­ tains the profound ideas of R. G.

In this book a detailed and systematic treatment of asymptotic methods in the theory of plates and shells is presented. The main features of the book are the basic principles of asymptotics and their applications, traditional approaches such as regular and singular perturbations, as well as new approaches such as the composite equations approach. The book introduces the reader to the field of asymptotic simplification of the problems of the theory of plates and shells and will be useful as a handbook of methods of asymptotic integration. Providing a state-of-the-art review of asymptotic applications, this book will be useful as an introduction to the field for novices as well as a reference book for specialists.

In this book a detailed and systematic treatment of asymptotic methods in the theory of plates and shells is presented. The main features of the book are the basic principles of asymptotics and their applications, traditional approaches such as regular and singular perturbations, as well as new approaches such as the composite equations approach. The book introduces the reader to the field of asymptotic simplification of the problems of the theory of plates and shells and will be useful as a handbook of methods of asymptotic integration. Providing a state-of-the-art review of asymptotic applications, this book will be useful as an introduction to the field for novices as well as a reference book for specialists.

This book describes significant tractable models used in solid mechanics - classical models used in modern mechanics as well as new ones. The models are selected to illustrate the main ideas which allow scientists to describe complicated effects in a simple manner and to clarify basic notations of solid mechanics. A model is considered to be tractable if it is based on clear physical assumptions which allow the selection of significant effects and relatively simple mathematical formulations.The first part of the book briefly reviews classical tractable models for a simple description of complex effects developed from the 18th to the 20th century and widely used in modern mechanics. The second part describes systematically the new tractable models used today for the treatment of increasingly complex mechanical objects – from systems with two degrees of freedom to three-dimensional continuous objects.

This book describes significant tractable models used in solid mechanics - classical models used in modern mechanics as well as new ones. The models are selected to illustrate the main ideas which allow scientists to describe complicated effects in a simple manner and to clarify basic notations of solid mechanics. A model is considered to be tractable if it is based on clear physical assumptions which allow the selection of significant effects and relatively simple mathematical formulations.The first part of the book briefly reviews classical tractable models for a simple description of complex effects developed from the 18th to the 20th century and widely used in modern mechanics. The second part describes systematically the new tractable models used today for the treatment of increasingly complex mechanical objects – from systems with two degrees of freedom to three-dimensional continuous objects.

How well is Nature simulated by the varied asymptotic models that imaginative scientists have invented? B. Birkhoff [52J This book deals with asymptotic methods in nonlinear dynamics. For the first time a detailed and systematic treatment of new asymptotic methods in combination with the Pade approximant method is presented. Most of the basic results included in this manuscript have not been treated but just mentioned in the literature. Providing a state-of-the-art review of asymptotic applications, this book will prove useful as an introduction to the field for novices as well a reference for specialists. Asymptotic methods of solving mechanical and physical problems have been developed by many authors. For example, we can refer to the excel­ lent courses by A. Nayfeh [119-122]' M. Van Dyke [154], E.J. Hinch [94J and many others [59, 66, 95, 109, 126, 155, 163, 50d, 59dJ. The main features of the monograph presented are: 1) it is devoted to the basic principles of asymp­ totics and its applications, and 2) it deals with both traditional approaches (such as regular and singular perturbations, averaging and homogenization, perturbations of the domain and boundary shape) and less widely used, new approaches such as one- and two-point Pade approximants, the distributional approach, and the method of boundary perturbations.

This book suggests a new common approach to the study of resonance energy transport based on the recently developed concept of Limiting Phase Trajectories (LPTs), presenting applications of the approach to significant nonlinear problems from different fields of physics and mechanics.