During the shootings occurred on the campus of Virginia Tech, the department of engineering science and mechanics lost two fine professors. Dr. Liviu Librescu was teaching solid mechanics class when the gunman initiated a two-minute massacre next door. Most of the students in his class escaped from the windows while Dr. Librescu held the door and did not survive when the gunman broke in. Another professor is Dr. Kevin Granata.
With a great many ties to VT, I have been following the tragic shootings there closely. While my former student (Nakhiah Goulbourne) and my former department head (Dick Benson) are both safe, I am afraid we may have lost one of our own this morning. From an AP report, a student stated that the instructor teaching a 9:05am mechanics class in 204 Norris Hall was killed. According to the timetable of classes at VT, this instructor would have been Liviu Librescu. I certainly hope the AP's report is wrong. As someone very interested in shell theories, I have spoken with Prof. Librescu many times and followed his work. His loss would be a great loss to our community.
This paper has been published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids 56 (2008), pp. 1609-1623 (doi:10.1016/j.jmps.2007.07.013).
Abstract
An Australian Research Council funded PhD Scholarship is available in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University in Australia in the area of computational mechanics. The objective of this project is to develop a multi-scale bifurcation-based decohesion model within the framework of the Material Point Method (MPM), one of the meshfree methods, for simulating glass fragmentation under blast loading.
Head traumatic injury due to the impact of a flying golf ball is one of the severest injuries sustained on a golf course. This paper presents numerical simulation results based on the finite element (FE) method to investigate head injuries in children due to impacts by flying golf balls.
Terence Tao (one of the Fields Medal winners this year) has started blogging. He has a detailed discussion on the Navier-Stokes equations here. It's long but definitely worth reading - particularly because of the wide range of ideas that he talks about.
Recently, I am interested in the interface between two different masses. But, I don’t know how to characterize the interface between them, especially the adhesive strength and the mechanics model.
Just a reminder that this Sunday, April 15 will be exactly 300 years since Leonhard Euler was born.
I am sure many mechanicians will toast this weekend on this extraordinnary anniversary to the person who laid down much of the foundations in mathematics and mechanics.
Some of the related links on the web are:
