Zhigang Suo's blog

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

Almost three years also , I posted an entry titled Scalar Done Wrong.  The entry has received a large number of comments, and 16,793 reads.  I have since tried to get scalars right.  I have just attached today’s version of my notes as a PDF file to the original entry.

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.  I compare spacetime and appleorange.

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

Wei Cai and Bill Nix, of Stanford University, have just published a new textbook Imperfections in Crystalline Solids.  You can look at the first chapter at the website of the Cambridge University Press.  

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

These notes are a part of the notes on linear algebra.

Muhammad Hussain leads a dynamic group at KAUST working on the development of stretchable and reconfigurable electronics.  He came to the field with a background of semiconductors.  Last year he gave an Applied Mechanics Colloquium at Harvard.  Students and faculty were all deeply impressed by the creativity and range of his work.

These fragments of notes are intended for a course on fracture mechanics, but I have always run out of time, and have never managed to go over them in class.  Some of the ideas are mentioned in various parts of the class.  I have also listed refeences and review articles.

These notes are part of my notes on linear algebra.  I believe that textbooks of linear algebra give a bad definition of linear form.  The last section of the notes explain why it is bad.  I also give examples of linear form everyday life and from physics.  Given the vector space of distance, both force and electric field are dual spaces of the space of distance.  They are distict dual spaces of the space of distance, and they are not dual spaces to each other.

Everything about AM 21b 2017

Everything about AM 21b 2018

 I’ll post sections of notes on linear algebra when they are ready.

Paper II.  A METHOD OF GEOMETRICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE THERMODYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF SUBSTANCES BY MEANS OF SURFACES, 1873

I bought this reprint by the Ox Bow Press in 1990s.  The quality of print is excellent. The book collects all papers of Gibbs on thermodynamics. I’ll focus on the three main papers:  Paper I (pp. 1-32), Paper II (pp. 33-54), and Paper III (pp. 55-371).  Papers I and II are short and fundamental.  Paper III is very long; it applied the basic approach developed in the short papers to a large number of important phenomena.  Over the years I have returned to the book many times, and will continue to do so in coming years.

This book collects English translations of nine papers, published in journals by Clausius, between 1850 and 1865.  This collection of original papers should not be confused with a later book of the same title, also by Clausius, where he worked his original papers into a textbook.

Planck submitted his doctoral dissertation in 1879, at the age of 21. According to Planck’s autobiography, his dissertation elaborated on Clausius's entropy and its role in distinguishing reversible and irreversible processes. His dissertation failed to interest his professors, Helmholtz and Kirchhoff among them. Planck subsequently, as a young academic, applied the principle of the increase of entropy to analyze phases and ideal-gas mixtures.

One Internet, multiple worlds.  People have gone mobile, but iMechanica has not.  Although iMechanica is accessible from mobile phones, but it was not designed as such.  On the other hand, mobile social networks are good mostly for short forms.  A practical solution seems to be posting on iMechanica and linking the entries to social networks, such as twitter, wechat, and Facebook.  For example, The New Yorker has a strong presence on Facebook, as my sons and their friends would say.   

Attached are the slides for a course on engineering thermodynamics.  Before coming to class, please watch these two videos on fuel cells:  

• Video 1 focuses on basic science
  
• Video 2 describes technology
  

Attatched are the slides for a course on engineering thermodynamics.  Before coming to class, please watch this tutorial on psychrometry. 

These slides are used in a course on thermodynamics.

slides for a course on engineering thermodynamics.  

Engines move.  Please watch some videos before you come to lectures.  Here are several videos to get you started.

1. The Innovation of the engine

These slides are used in a course on thermodynamics.

The International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics will be held in Montréal, Canada, August 21-26, 2016.  The deadline for submitting a paper will be 15 January 2016.

These slides are part of a course on thermodynamics.