Back to Departmental Colloquium: Fall 2025
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Thursday, Oct 2, 2025
Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM
Location: JWB 335
Gilles Francfort
Flatiron Institute
Title |
The fraught history of brittle fracture |
Abstract |
Attempting to rationalize how and predict when rupture occurs in a solid has been a frustrating exercise since the early 19th century post-Cauchy dawn of fracture mechanics. I will attempt to briefly retrace that history with an emphasis on its equally frustrating interplay with the available mathematics. I will end with a vision of the current disarray that fracture mechanics shares with solid mechanics in the large. |
Applied Mathematics