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When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North American Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical En gineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch a plane in flight-especially in a tum-without imaging it bristling with vec tors. Near the end of the course the professor showed that, if an airplane is treated as a rigid body, there arises a mysterious collection of rather simple looking integrals called the components of the moment of inertia tensor. Tensor-what power those two syllables seemed to resonate. I had heard the word once before, in an aside by a graduate instructor to the cognoscenti in the front row of a course in strength of materials. "What the book calls stress is actually a tensor. . . ." With my interest twice piqued and with time off from fighting the brush fires of a demanding curriculum, I was ready for my first serious effort at self instruction. In Los Angeles, after several tries, I found a store with a book on tensor analysis. In my mind I had rehearsed the scene in which a graduate stu dent or professor, spying me there, would shout, "You're an undergraduate.
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Table of contents (4 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A Brief on Tensor Analysis
Authors: James G. Simmonds
Series Title: Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0141-7
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
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eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag New York Inc. 1982
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4684-0141-7Published: 06 December 2012
Series ISSN: 0172-6056
Series E-ISSN: 2197-5604
Edition Number: 1
Topics: Analysis