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This book presents critical evaluations of various historical sources and their impact on technological development. The problem of the origins of the Principle of Virtual Work is discussed and an exegesis of the Pseudo-Aristotle Mechanica Problemata is presented. Readers will also find an exploration of the criteria used to evaluate scientific works, providing insight into the selection and preservation of significant scholarly contributions. In particular, the case of Continuum Mechanics textbooks selection in XX century is examined.
List of contents
1. Exegesis of some excerpts of Mechanica Problemata.- 2. Who was the first to formulate the Principle of VirtualWork?.- 3. Germain's 1973 article on the method of virtual power in continuum mechanics.- 4. Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and the Impact of Publish or Perish Culture on Continuum Mechanics. 5. Castigat ridendo mores.
About the author
Francesco dell’Isola has been a Full Professor at the Department of Structure and Geotechnical Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), since 2006, and at the Department of Civil Engineering (DICEAA), University of L’Aquila (Italy), since 2016. In 2016, he also became Director of the International Research Center M&MoCS (University of L’Aquila). Since 2015, he has served as the Responsible Italian Scientific Expert at the Laboratoire International Associé (LIA) Coss&Vita, a French-Italian international laboratory. He is honorary professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, CNRS Fellow Ambassador 2023-2025 and Visiting Professor at ENS Paris Saclay. His research primarily focuses on history of mechanics and on the synthesis and design of metamaterials and generalized models in continuum mechanics.
Simon R. Eugster is an Associate Professor and head of the Computational Dynamics group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He studied Mechanical Engineering at the ETH Zurich and received his BSc and MSc degrees in 2007 and 2009, respectively. For his PhD, he joined the Institute of Mechanical Systems at ETH Zurich, where he graduated in 2014. Between 2014 and 2024, he was appointed as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. In March 2024, Eugster joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on the development of mathematical models and computational methods to describe the dynamics of flexible multi-body systems with frictional contact.
Maximilian Stilz is a Research Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Systems Engineering (INATECH) at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He obtained his BSc in Physics from the Free University of Berlin in 2012, followed by a MSc in Theoretical Physics from the Technical University of Berlin in 2014. In 2019, he joined INATECH, where he completed his PhD in Engineering in 2024. His research specializes in the mathematical modeling of mechanical metamaterials within the framework of generalized continuum mechanics, as well as developing methods for their computational analysis.
