education

Good International news on Caltech and engineering. Ares Rosakis, chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science,describes Caltech as “a unique species among universities…a very interesting phenomenon”.More can be found in the attachment or at the link below

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/caltech-secrets-of-the-w…

I have updated my notes on the Griffith paper.  I added more description on the experimental determination of surface tension of solids.  Griiffith himself determined the surface tension of glass by an experimental setup.  Udin et al (1949) described a setup based on the same principle.  This setup is now known as the zero creep experiment.

Lecturers:

Basile Audoly - Université Pierre et Marie Curie and CNRS, Paris, France

Katia Bertoldi - University of Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

Davide Bigoni - Università di Trento, Italy

Alain Goriely - University of Oxford, UK

The class started today.  I'll be teaching fracture mechanics this semester.  I'll be mostly using the class notes I wrote in 2010, but will post updated ones. 

In today's class I covered "Trouble with linear elastic theory of strength."  I have just posted updated notes of the lecture.  The new notes begin with the follwoing paragraphs.

I recently posted a free, online, and
condensed version of my book Intermediate Mechanics of Materials, Second
Edition. It is posted on my  website madhuvable.org
and can be used for reference or by self-learners. In addition to the
online book, there is a glossary of mechanics terms, brief reviews of
Statics, Matrix Algebra, Numerical Methods, and Mechanics of Materials.

Apples and oranges. Each element in a set is a pile containing some number of apples and some number of oranges.  Adding two piles means putting them together, resulting in a pile in the set. Multiplying a pile and a real number r means finding in the set a pile r times the amount.  We model each pile as a vector, and the set as a two-dimensional vector space over the field of real numbers.