Isaac Elishakoff ... 400 pages - Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co.; 3rd edition (May, 2017) ... Language: English - ISBN-10: 981314985X - ISBN-13: 978-9813149854 ...
The first edition of this book appeared over three decades ago
(Wiley-Interscience, 1983), whereas the second one saw light on the
verge of new millennium (Dover, 1999). This is third, corrected and
expanded edition that appears in conjunction with its companion volume
Probabilistic Methods in the Theory of Structures: Complete
Worked-Through Solutions. Thus, the reader is able to both get
acquainted with the theoretical material and be able to master some of
the problems, following Chinese dictum: I hear and I forget. I see and I
remember. I do and I understand — Confucius. The main idea
of the book lies in the fact that three topics: probabilistic strength
of materials, random vibrations, and probabilistic buckling are
presented in a single package allowing one to see the forest in between
the trees. Indeed, these three topics usually are presented in separate
manners, in different specialized books. Here, the reader gets a feeling
of true unity of the subject at large in order to appreciate that in
the end what one wants is reliability of the structure, in conjunction
with its operating conditions. As the author describes in the
Preface of the second edition, this book was not conceived ab initio,
as a book that author strived to compose. Rather, it was forced, as it
were, upon me due to two reasons. One was rather a surprising but
understandable requirement in the venerable Delft University of
Technology, The Netherlands to prepare the lecture notes for students
with the view of reducing skyrocketing costs of acquisition of textbooks
by the students. The other one was an unusually warm acceptance of the
notes that the author prepared while at Delft University of Technology
and later in Haifa, at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology by
the legendary engineering scientist Warner Tjardus Koiter (1914–1997).
The energy necessary to prepare the second and third editions came from
enthusiastic reviews that appeared in various sources. Author embraced
the simplicity of exposition as the main virtue following Isaac Newton's
view that "Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the
multiplicity and confusion of things." Readership: Researchers and academics interested in the theory of structures.