What is it about?

Engineers model and compute the reality. Newton was amazed how an apple falls down by the gravity. Hooke did bend metal bars. Tesla wanted to build huge magnetic machines. Maxwell could figure out how to model electromagnetic fields, so we have Wi-Fi today. Einstein helped us to build accurate GPS navigation systems. Modeling the reality is challenging and engineers manage to do this in mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. This work explains the theory, all fine details and yet simple enough to follow, in the case of many multiphysics systems and simulates real world applications.

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Why is it important?

There is no scientific study without analysis and most of these are done by using computations. Especially in continuum mechanics, coupled and nonlinear equations show up for modeling sophisticated systems. Nature is not very simple to model and yet we need to find a way to solve these equations. Open-source packages help us to develop simple and short codes to successfully solve many engineering examples. Three parts of this book concentrates on mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. All these scientific branches are actually analogous, whenever we use continuum mechanics, we realize that we follow straight-forward rules to comprehend and apply a dozen of systems by computing the reality.

Perspectives

By researching and teaching in several continents and working with diverse scientists, I have realized that we only learn by considering, replicating, developing, explaining---in simpler words: learning by doing. Reading a textbook is useful, but one needs to digest the information and this path is only possible, if they write a code, solve the equations, play with parameters, sees what happens. Every researcher has a laptop with Linux, MacOs, or Windows on it, so programming in Python is a universal tool. This book is very technical, but it is not only theory but also application based. Every subject from solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, thermomechanics, electrodynamics has a simple system and the code is included in the book. I have seen a big impact on how to learn and develop science, by simply getting the hands full of coding. Start computing the reality!

Bilen Emek Abali
Technische Universitat Berlin

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This page is a summary of: Computational Reality, January 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-2444-3.
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