ABSTRACT
Where Irwin, Griffith, Eshelby, Cherepanov, Rice, Budiansky, Sobolev and Schwartz, and many others join efforts to show that material-configurational forces provide the basic formulation of the theory of fracture, whether brittle or ductile, where topological changes take over and cause an irreversible thermodynamic evolution, yielding a global dissipation, where the total energy of a system is shown to consist of elastic energy and the appropriately defined energy of defects and, finally, where it is shown to the anxious reader how to devise evolution criteria for engineering purposes while good mathematics are at work in the background.
