One-forms on spaces of embeddings: a frame work for constitutive laws in elasticity

Abstract

The present contribution to this volume is concerned with certain problems in non-linear functional analysis which are motivated by classical physics, specifically by elasticity theory:we are given a «body»,i.e. a compact smooth manifold which moves and may be deformed in some (equipped with a fixed inner product); we assume that the motion and deformation are such that the diffeomorphism type of does not change. Hence, is the image under a smooth embedding of some compact smooth manifold M (possibly with boundary ) and the appropriate configuration space for the problem is the set of smooth embeddings ; this set is a smooth Frechet manifold when endowed with its natural -topology.