Reissue of Encyclopedia of Physics / Handbuch der Physik, Volume VIa The
mechanical response of solids was first reduced to an organized science
of fairly general scope in the nineteenth century. The theory of small
elastic deformations is in the main the creation of CAUCHY, who,
correcting and simplifying the work of NAVIER and POISSON, through an
astounding application of conjoined scholarship, originality, and labor
greatly extended in breadth the shallowest aspects of the treatments of
par- of bodies by GALILEO, LEIBNIZ, JAMES BERNOULLI, PARENT, DANIEL BER-
ticular kinds NOULLI, EULER, and COULOMB. Linear elasticity became a
branch of mathematics, culti- vated wherever there were mathematicians.
The magisterial treatise of loVE in its second edition, 1906 - clear,
compact, exhaustive, and learned - stands as the summary of the
classical theory. It is one of the great "gaslight works" that in
BOCHNER'S words! "either do not have any adequate successor[s] . . .
or, at least, refuse to be super- seded . . .; and so they have to be
reprinted, in ever increasing numbers, for active research and
reference", as long as State and Society shall permit men to learn
mathe- matics by, for, and of men's minds. Abundant experimentation on
solids was done during the same century. Usually the materials arising
in nature, with which experiment most justly concerns itself, do not
stoop easily to the limitations classical elasticity posits.
