This collection of 23 articles is the output of lectures in special sessions on The History of
Theoretical Material and Computational Mechanics within the yearly conferences of the GAMM in
the years 2010 in Karlsruhe Germany 2011 in Graz Austria and in 2012 in Darmstadt Germany
GAMM is the Association for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics founded in 1922 by Ludwig
Prandtl and Richard von Mises. The contributions in this volume discuss different aspects of
mechanics. They are related to solid and fluid mechanics in general and to specific problems in
these areas including the development of numerical solution techniques. In the first part the
origins and developments of conservation principles in mechanics and related variational
methods are treated together with challenging applications from the 17th to the 20th century.
Part II treats general and more specific aspects of material theories of deforming solid
continua and porous soils. and Part III presents important theoretical and engineering
developments in fluid mechanics beginning with remarkable inventions in old Egypt the still
dominating role of the Navier-Stokes PDEs for fluid flows and their complex solutions for a
wide field of parameters as well as the invention of pumps and turbines in the 19th and 20th
century. The last part gives a survey on the development of direct variational methods - the
Finite Element Method - in the 20th century with many extensions and generalizations.
