Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on to the basic concepts of the Green's function theory for linear boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations. It illustrates some indirect applications of beam influence functions. The book deals with some specific problems from applied mechanics, which reduce to the so-called multi-point posed boundary value problems for systems of linear ordinary differential equations. It introduces the notion of a matrix of Green's type appropriate for a particular type of multi-point posed boundary value problems stated for a sandwich type media. The book also focuses on to problems described by partial differential equations where the list of available Green's functions is very limited. The technique is based on the so-called method of eigenfunction expansion and has proven to be especially effective for a variety of problems in computational continuum mechanics.