ABSTRACT
The subject 'Strength of Materials' originates from the earliest attempts to account for the behaviour of structures under load. Thus the problems of particular interest to the first investigators, Galileo and Hooke in the seventeenth century, and Euler and Coulomb in the eighteenth, ~ were the very practical problems associated with the behaviour of beams and columns; at a somewhat later stage, general mathematical investigations of the behaviour of elastic bodies were made by Navier (1821) and Cauchy (1822). The theory of structures has subsequently developed so that it now includes many different and sophisticated fields of interest. Nevertheless, the topic 'Strength of Materials' traditionally covers those aspects of the theory that were the subject of the original research: the theory of bars and the general theory of elasticity. This chapter, therefore, is essentially a review of the main features of these two somewhat disparate theories, and contains some of the results that are of immediate importance to civil engineers.
