An updated account of the state of the art in the subject, presenting recent progress in two active and related areas of continuum mechanics: fracture mechanics and structured deformations.

by Noll, then scantly known, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. An invita- tional meeting on visco-elasticity in the following April at Lancaster, Pennsyl- vania, brought Coleman and Noll together. In those days a person went to a meet- ing so as to learn from a few competent lectures without having to be himself one more "invited speaker" or to listen to many multiples of ten minutes of trivial trash. Ericksen lectured on "laminar shear flows" of incompressible, Rivlin-Erick- sen fluids. That class of flows contains all those for which Rivlin and others had obtained exact solutions. Ericksen's paper, with Criminale & Filbey as co-authors, was to appear soon in Volume 1 of the Archive. At the meeting, Coleman and Noll found that they had similar views on thermodynamics. The rheologists there, like those we had encountered elsewhere, told us that classical thermodynamics was a complete, closed, perfect science, all in Gibbs's paper, and they laughed at us. We laughed at them, but silently, for we had read fundamental parts of Gibbs's work, especially that on the isothermal and isentropic theories of three-dimensional elasticity, which, surely, the rheologists could not understand. We knew also the basic inequality for increase of entropy asserted by Duhem (1901) and in "The Mechanical Foundations" (1952) called "the Clausius-Duhem inequality" (Eq. (28. 5", from which Eckart (1940) had drawn consequences by guessing the signs oftwo terms ("Mechanical Foundations", text following Eq. (31. 1".

This book is the first organized collection of some results that have been obtained by the authors, their collaborators, and other researchers in the variational approach to structured deformations. It sets the basis and makes more accessible the theoretical apparatus for assigning an energy to a structured deformation, thereby providing motivation to researchers in applied mathematics, continuum mechanics, engineering, and materials science to study the deformation of a solid body without committing at the outset to a specific mechanical theory. Researchers will benefit from an approach in which elastic, plastic, and fracture phenomena can be treated in a unified way. ​The book is intended for an audience acquainted with measure theory, the theory of functions of bounded variation, and continuum mechanics. Any students in their last years of undergraduate studies, graduate students, and researchers with a background in applied mathematics, the calculus of variations, and continuum mechanics will have the prerequisite to read this book.