The writing of the second part of this book presented a peculiar difficulty. On the one hand I had the great advantage of having found the first rough draft of the manuscript La Religion du Chretien, corrected and often recorrected. Authorship could eventually be established beyond shadow of doubt, and in the corrections one could see de Vallone changing his opinions as he wrote. On the other the sheer length of the manuscript - about 140,000 words - plus the num- ber of corrections - well over 3,000, many of them lengthy - the enormous number of references in the text to the Classics, to the...

This book is intended to serve all those who are interested in structural opti mization, whether they work in this field or study it for other purposes. Rapid growth of interest in the cognitive aspects of optimization and the increas ing demands that the present day engineer has to meet in modern design have created the need of a monographic treatment of the subject. The vast number and wide range of structural optimization problems formulated and investigated in the last twenty years call for an attempt to sum up the pres ent state of knowledge in this domain and to outline the directions...

This book is intended to serve all those who are interested in structural opti mization, whether they work in this field or study it for other purposes. Rapid growth of interest in the cognitive aspects of optimization and the increas ing demands that the present day engineer has to meet in modern design have created the need of a monographic treatment of the subject. The vast number and wide range of structural optimization problems formulated and investigated in the last twenty years call for an attempt to sum up the pres ent state of knowledge in this domain and to outline the directions...