Material Inhomogeneities and their Evolution : A Geometric Approach

Inhomogeneity theory is important for the description of a variety of material phenomena. This concise and understandable book presents a unified treatment of the theory using some of the tools of modern differential geometry. The first part of the book deals with the geometrical description of uniform bodies and their homogeneity (i.e., integrability) conditions. In the second part, a theory of material evolution is developed and its relevance in various applied contexts discussed. The necessary geometrical notions are introduced as needed in the first two parts but often without due attention to an uncompromising mathematical rigour. This task is left for the third part of the book, which is a highly technical compendium of those concepts of modern differential geometry that are invoked in the first two parts. To make the text as useful as possible to active researchers and graduate students, considerable attention has been devoted to non-standard topics.