education

This is an introductory post to a discussion on the advantages of multicellular organisms over single-celled eukaryotes from an energy harvesting viewpoint.  It is intended for the New Mexico Tech biomechanics class but others can play.

As engineers we should seek for a numerical measure (or some measures) that allows us to decide how close an organism is to the optimum.  Consider two cases: a seaweed in comparison to a single-cell photosynthetic eukaryote and a herbivore in comparison to a single-celled eukaryotic animal.

This afternoon, I had an extremely pleasant Google hangout with Daniel Suo, and Professors Zhigang Suo and Teng Li . Our main focus was on brainstorming ideas on how to improve the user experience on iMechanica. After an hour or so our conversation drifted towards educational topics including novel ways of incorporating technology in STEM education.

I read with interest an excellent discussion about Linear Algebra in Mechanics. I am attaching Chapter I: Tensor Preliminaries from my book Elastoplasticity Theory, which includes Hill's analysis of induced tensors mentioned in the discussion.

Update on 9 April 2016.  At the bottom of this post, I attach a pdf file of my notes on scalar.

Notes on scalars now forms part of my notes on linear algebra.

I attach some class notes developed by the late Professor Donald Carlson from which many generations of students at the University of Illinois learnt Continuum Mechanics.

Linear algebra is significant to many aspects of mechanics.  For some years I have been using the book by Shilov.  But this book may or may not be a good one to recommend to a student, depending on his or her prior experience.  On StackExchange Mathematics, there are several excellent threads discussing textbooks of linear algebra.  A particular recommendation was made for