A Brief on Tensor Analysis [electronic resource] by J.G. Simmonds.
When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North American Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical En gineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch a...
Uniform Title: | Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics,
2197-5604 |
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Main Author: | |
Corporate Author: | |
Language: | English |
Published: |
New York, NY :
Springer New York : Imprint: Springer,
1982.
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Edition: | 1st ed. 1982. |
Series: | Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics,
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | |
Format: | Electronic eBook |
Summary: |
When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North American Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical En gineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch a plane in flight-especially in a tum-without imaging it bristling with vec tors. Near the end of the course the professor showed that, if an airplane is treated as a rigid body, there arises a mysterious collection of rather simple looking integrals called the components of the moment of inertia tensor. Tensor-what power those two syllables seemed to resonate. I had heard the word once before, in an aside by a graduate instructor to the cognoscenti in the front row of a course in strength of materials. "What the book calls stress is actually a tensor. . . ." With my interest twice piqued and with time off from fighting the brush fires of a demanding curriculum, I was ready for my first serious effort at self instruction. In Los Angeles, after several tries, I found a store with a book on tensor analysis. In my mind I had rehearsed the scene in which a graduate stu dent or professor, spying me there, would shout, "You're an undergraduate. |
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ISBN: | 9781468401417 (online) |
ISSN: | 2197-5604 |