A recent discussion at iMechanica following my last post here [^] leads to this post. The context of that discussion is assumed here.

I present here three sample problems, thought of almost at random, just to see how the suggestions made by Jaydeep in the above post work out.

To the best of my knowledge, the two momentum conservation principles, namely, the conservation of linear- and angular-momentum, operate completely independent of each other. For an isolated object, there is no possibility of conversion of one form of momentum to the other.

Today, when I Googled on this topic, I found that most pages agree with my position above. Yet, to my great surprise, I did run into a page written by an engineer here [^] claiming that the linear momentum is only a special case of the angular momentum... Here is the relevant excerpt (bold emphasis mine):

Job Title:Computational Geomechanics Job Summary:ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company has an immediate opening in Computational Mechanics for research scientist at our Corporate Strategic Research Laboratory. Our lab focuses on fundamental science that can lead to technologies having a direct impact on the oil and gas industry.

Hi,

I'm an Engineer and a Ph.D. student in Applied Maths, working in the field of Nonlinear Finite Elements for Elasticity. I often think about my future career since, by now, I have a strong experience with coding FE in C++/Matlab/Mathematica, but no clue whatsoever about commercial black-box softwares for FEA. I'm worried about this, since most of the job vacancies from the industry (I'm not interested in pursuing the Academic career) seem to require only experience with a specific software and application, and not to directly code FE.

I want to find a reference to learn about motion groups SE(N). Any recommendations will be appreciated. Regards, Deepak Trivedi

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.

This has reference to (only) the *last paragraph* in Prof. Harry Lewis' recent post, found at: http://www.imechanica.org/node/1423#comment-2880.

The reason I write the present post is because I always seem to have had a view of inventing, learning, or teaching mathematics that is remarkably at odds with what Prof. Lewis' last paragraph *seems* to imply.