The lecture notes of the two courses I taught at Stanford University during the last two quarters, "ME 340 Elasticity" and "ME 334 Introduction to Statistical Mechanics", are available in PDF format online at:



  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me340/



  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me334/

Perhaps it could be useful to you.

In the attached paper, we construct new generalized coordinates for arbitrary polytopes in d-dimensions (polygons and polyhedra in 2- and 3-dimensions, respectively) using the principle of maximum entropy. The paper is to appear in Computer Graphics Forum and will be presented at the SGP'08 Conference in Denmark.  

I stumbled across this interesting blog post yesterday concerning an upcoming course on medicine via web 2.0.   It appeared quite interesting from several perspectives: first, medicine is often associated with being behind the times on technology but this all looks pretty current, secondly it may be the most comprehensive listing of topics I have seen where web 2.0 is applied to a single discipline, and finally it made me wonder what more we could do with mechanics via web 2.0 beyon

We have recently studied the atomic scale structural stability of
freestanding wavy gold (Au) nanofilms using molecular dynamics
simulations. In recent years, wavy or patterned structurs have shown great promise for applications in various emerging technologies including fuel cells
engineering, tissue engineering, biomedical engineering, creation
of counterfeit-resistant documents , nanolithography in microelectronics, optoelectronics, nanomachinesand many others. It is out of question that the success of these novel applications lies on one crucial factor – the

This paper studies the invariance of balance of

energy for a system of interacting particles under groups of

transformations. Balance of energy and its invariance is first

examined in Euclidean space. Unlike the case of continuous media,

it is shown that conservation and balance laws do not follow

from the assumption of invariance of balance of energy under

time-dependent isometries of the ambient space. However, the

postulate of invariance of balance of energy under arbitrary