ABSTRACT

From the simplest observation, we can say that the dynamics of a body, or of a system with more than one particle, can be modeled properly only if collisions are taken into account. In the works of Galileo and Descartes there are references to the collision between particles, but the first published works on this problem seem to

be due to John Wallis and Christopher Wren, independently, in 1668. Some great scientists such as Newton, Huygens, Coriolis, Darboux, Routh, Apple, Carnot and Poisson have also treated the problem. At the beginning of the twentieth century the problem generated some discussion, as we can see in the works of Painleve´ [1] and Klein [2]. But, up to 1984, all of these works used the theory developed by Newton or by Poisson and the difficulty was to include friction in the modeling, as was pointed out by Painleve´ in his paper “Sur les lois de frottement de glissement.”