Zhigang Suo's blog

We are launching a new journal, Extreme Mechanics Letters. EML will publish letter-sized papers. We aim to achieve rapid communication. Our goal is to have the accepted papers published within 6-8 weeks upon submission. We aim to build a home at the frontier of engineering, medicine, science and entertainment, where advances are rapid and mechanics matters. We seek papers from researchers in all disciplines.

We will start to review submissions on 1 October 2014, and publish first papers by 1 December 2014. The beginning issues will be freely accessible online, and printed copies will be distributed at conferences.

We love to publish your extremely new ideas on extremely useful and extremely interesting mechanics. Please submit your papers soon.

The nervous system has long been an inspiration for the engineer.  Here is an example in a popular textbook on neuroscience.  When a person steps on a nail, the sensor in his foot sends a signal to his brain, the brain sends a signal to his muscle, and he lifts his foot.  The example illustrates the sensor, actuator and processor in the nervous system.

Here is the call for proposals .   The due date is 1 May 2014.

Ju Li, Zhiwei Shan and Evan Ma have edited the February 2014 issue of the MRS Bulletin devoted to the effects of elastic strains on solid-state devices.

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences seeks applicants for the position of Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, with an expected start date of July 1, 2014. This position will be for five years and may be renewed.  Deadlin for application is 15 March 2014.  See further information.  See also a position for Applied Math Fellows.

I have updated my notes on "Energe Release Rate.  Fracture Energy".  I will use my twitter account to update my teaching, research, and reading.  You will get an automatic update if you subscribe to my twitter account.

I have updated my notes on the Griffith paper.  I added more description on the experimental determination of surface tension of solids.  Griiffith himself determined the surface tension of glass by an experimental setup.  Udin et al (1949) described a setup based on the same principle.  This setup is now known as the zero creep experiment.

The class started today.  I'll be teaching fracture mechanics this semester.  I'll be mostly using the class notes I wrote in 2010, but will post updated ones. 

In today's class I covered "Trouble with linear elastic theory of strength."  I have just posted updated notes of the lecture.  The new notes begin with the follwoing paragraphs.

Apples and oranges. Each element in a set is a pile containing some number of apples and some number of oranges.  Adding two piles means putting them together, resulting in a pile in the set. Multiplying a pile and a real number r means finding in the set a pile r times the amount.  We model each pile as a vector, and the set as a two-dimensional vector space over the field of real numbers.

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.