Inthecourseofthelast?ftyyears, developmentsinnonsmoothana- sisandnonsmoothmechanicshaveoftenbeencloselylinked. Thepresent book acts as an illustration of this. Its objective is two-fold. It is of course intended to help to di?use the recent results obtained by various renownedspecialists. ButthereisanequaldesiretopayhomagetoJean Jacques Moreau, who is undoubtedly the most emblematic ?gure in the correlated, not to say dual, advances in these two ?elds. Jean Jacques Moreau appears as a rightful heir to the founders of di?erential calculus and mechanics through the depth of his thinking in the ?eld of nonsmooth mechanics and the size of his contribution to the development of nonsmooth analysis. His interest in mechanics has focused on a wide variety of subjects: singularities in ?uid ?ows, the initiation of cavitation, plasticity, and the statics and dynamics of gr- ular media. The 'Ariadne's thread' running throughout is the notion of unilateral constraint. Allied to this is his investment in mathematics in the ?elds of convex analysis, calculus of variations and di?erential m- sures. When considering these contributions, regardless of their nature, one cannot fail to be struck by their clarity, discerning originality and elegance. Precision and rigor of thinking, clarity and elegance of style are the distinctive features of his work.
This book’s title, Nonsmooth Mechanics and Analysis, refers to a major domain of mechanics, particularly those initiated by the works of Jean Jacques Moreau. Nonsmooth mechanics concerns mechanical situations with possible nondifferentiable relationships, eventually discontinuous, as unilateral contact, dry friction, collisions, plasticity, damage, and phase transition. The basis of the approach consists in dealing with such problems without resorting to any regularization process. Indeed, the nonsmoothness is due to simplified mechanical modeling; a more sophisticated model would require too large a number of variables, and sometimes the mechanical information is not available via experimental investigations. Therefore, the mathematical formulation becomes nonsmooth; regularizing would only be a trick of arithmetic without any physical justification.
Nonsmooth analysis was developed, especially in Montpellier, to provide specific theoretical and numerical tools to deal with nonsmoothness. It is important not only in mechanics but also in physics, robotics, and economics.
Audience
This book is intended for researchers in mathematics and mechanics.
