One of the things that I've thought about often in relation to mechanics is:

 1)  There's a paucity of heroes. Growing up, my heroes were not mechanicians. Certainly not any of the mechanicians in the last 100-150 years. Physics has it's heroes: Feynman, Hawking, Einstein, Wheeler, Bardeen, Oppenheimer etc. etc.

Does anyone know of a simple book, approximately 50 pages or so, for plasticity?. I am looking for something that is similar to Morton Gurtin's "Topics in Finite Elasticty" published by SIAM. This book is an uncluttered treatment of finite deformation elasticity and was very useful for me during graduate work. I am NOT looking for 200-300 page texts, becasue I will never get around to reading them.

 -Amit 

I'd like to bring this sad news to the attention of iMechanica:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2716073,prtpage-1.cm...

Edit: Amit, I hope you don't mind that I changed the title of this post.-John Dolbow

Lately I have been thinking that "Graduate Student" is a misnomer. The correct title should be "Graduate Research Assistant" or "Graduate Engineer".  After more than a year spent in industry, I think that there really is no difference in the work done. Except that the work environment is more flexible in academia.