Leonid P. Lebedev – författare

This is a book for those who enjoy thinking about how and why Nature can be described using mathematical tools. Approximating Perfection considers the background behind mechanics as well as the mathematical ideas that play key roles in mechanical applications. Concentrating on the models of applied mechanics, the book engages the reader in the types of nuts-and-bolts considerations that are normally avoided in formal engineering courses: how and why models remain imperfect, and the factors that motivated their development. The opening chapter reviews and reconsiders the basics of calculus from a fully applied point of view; subsequent chapters explore selected topics from solid mechanics, hydrodynamics, and the natural sciences. Emphasis is placed on the logic that underlies modeling in mechanics and the many surprising parallels that exist between seemingly diverse areas. The mathematical demands on the reader are kept to a minimum, so the book will appeal to a wide technical audience.

This book offers a brief, practically complete, and relatively simple introduction to functional analysis. It also illustrates the application of functional analytic methods to the science of continuum mechanics. Abstract but powerful mathematical notions are tightly interwoven with physical ideas in the treatment of nontrivial boundary value problems for mechanical objects.

This second edition includes more extended coverage of the classical and abstract portions of functional analysis. Taken together, the first three chapters now constitute a regular text on applied functional analysis. This potential use of the book is supported by a significantly extended set of exercises with hints and solutions. A new appendix, providing a convenient listing of essential inequalities and imbedding results, has been added.

The book should appeal to graduate students and researchers in physics, engineering, and applied mathematics.

Reviews of first edition:

"This book covers functional analysis and its applications to continuum mechanics. The presentation is concise but complete, and is intended for readers in continuum mechanics who wish to understand the mathematical underpinnings of the discipline. … Detailed solutions of the exercises are provided in an appendix." (L’Enseignment Mathematique, Vol. 49 (1-2), 2003)

This book offers a concise introduction to mathematical inequalities for graduate students and researchers in the fields of engineering and applied mathematics. It begins by reviewing essential facts from algebra and calculus and proceeds with a presentation of the central inequalities of applied analysis, illustrating a wide variety of practical applications. The text provides a gentle introduction to abstract spaces, such as metric, normed and inner product spaces. It also provides full coverage of the central inequalities of applied analysis, such as Young''s inequality, the inequality of the means, Hölder''s inequality, Minkowski''s inequality, the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, Chebyshev''s inequality, Jensen''s inequality and the triangle inequality.

The second edition features extended coverage of applications, including continuum mechanics and interval analysis. It also includes many additional examples and exercises with hints and full solutions that may appeal to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry or any other quantitative science.

The book presents foundations of the micropolar continuum mechanics including a short but comprehensive introduction of stress and strain measures, derivation of motion equations and discussion of the difference between Cosserat and classical (Cauchy) continua, and the discussion of more specific problems related to the  constitutive modeling, i.e. constitutive inequalities, symmetry groups, acceleration waves, etc.