After nearly half a century of developments in
numerical methods, the field of computational mechanics has
become sufficiently mature to collect the achievements and
summarize the state-of-the-art in a comprehensive,
authoritative major reference work. This idea, first conceived in
1999, has resulted in the Encyclopedia of Computational
Mechanics. It has been the intention of the editors and
the publisher to provide the community with a systematic,
well-organized survey of established as well as recently
developed computational methods, covering applied and
computational mathematics, computer science, the various
branches of solid and fluid mechanics, and all the
available discretization methods. Attention has also been paid
to many engineering and other applications.
We have invited first-class scientists and engineers to join
us in this challenging endeavor. It is our pleasure to thank
all our contributors warmly for their excellent chapters and
for completing them in a tight time frame.
A major reference work like the Encyclopedia of
Computational Mechanics should provide trustworthy facts and
information. We hope that the reviewing process to which
each chapter has been submitted will guarantee the high
quality we have aimed for. We would like to acknowledge
the careful and constructive work of all of our reviewers.
The Encyclopedia of Computational Mechanics is
organized in three volumes with the subjects 'Fundamentals'
(Volume 1), 'Solids and Structures' (Volume 2), and
'Fluids' (Volume 3), and is published both in print and on line.
Volume 1, Fundamentals, contains contributions related
to mathematics, mechanics, and computer science, and is
structured as discretization methods (fourteen chapters),
treating approximations with finite differences, discrete
variational forms, boundary integral equations and further
problem-oriented techniques, and the generation and
visualization of geometry; meshes and results (three chapters);
various direct and iterative solvers (five chapters); and time-
dependent problems (three chapters).