MIT 3.60 Lec 20a Symmetry, Structure, Tensor Properties of Materials
PROFESSOR: Having looked at the quizzes in a preliminary fashion, I come to the conclusion that some notes on tensors would be useful for the remainder of the term. So at great pain and personal sacrifice I will endeavor to [INAUDIBLE] All right, let me remind you of where we were a week ago-- before a slight unpleasantness intervened-- and we had just begun to look at the properties of a very useful surface, the representation quadric. And we said that to define it we would take the elements of a second rank tensor, something of the form A11, A12, A13, A21, A22, A23, A31, A32, A33. And we'd use those elements as coefficients in a second rank, a quadratic equation, of the form Aij Xi Xj equals 1. OK, so the Xi and Xj are the coordinates in our three-dimensional space. And the set of coordinates that satisfy this equation-- setting the right hand side equal to a constant-- will define some surface in space. And it's going to be a surface that is a quadratic form, s...