There are three changes in the second edition. First with the help of readers and
colleagues-thanks to all-I have corrected typographical errors and made minor changes in
substance and style. Second I have added a fewmore Exercises especially at the end
ofChapter4.Third I have appended a section on Differential Geometry the essential
mathematical tool in the study of two-dimensional structural shells and four-dimensional
general relativity. JAMES G. SIMMONDS vii Preface to the First Edition When I was an
undergraduate working as a co-op student at North Ameri can Aviation I tried to learn
something about tensors. In the Aeronautical Engineering Department at MIT I had just finished
an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot
watch a plane in flight-especially in a turn-without imaging it bristling with vec tors. Near
the end of the course the professor showed that if an airplane is treated as a rigid body
there arises a mysterious collection of rather simple looking integrals called the components
of the moment of inertia tensor.
