J-B. J. FOURIER'S immensely influential treatise Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur 21J, and the subsequent developments and refinements of FOURIER's ideas and methods at the hands of many authors, provide a highly successful theory of heat conduction. According to that theory, the growth or decay of the temperature e in a conducting body is governed by the heat equation, that is, by the parabolic partial differential equation Such has been the influence of FOURIER'S theory, which must forever remain the classical theory in that it sets the standard against which all other theories are to be...

This Tract gives an account of certain recent attempts to construct a satisfactory theory of thermodynamics for materials which have a memory for the past. Naturally it draws heavily on the writings of those who have made significant contributions to the field. I am particularly grateful to Professor C. A. Truesdell of The lohns Hopkins University for his invitation to write the Tract and to Professor A. E. Green of Oxford for his comments on various parts of the manuscript. Hertford College, Oxford December 1971 W. A. Day Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Preliminaries 5 1. 1 Vector and...

The aim of this book is to comment on, and clarify, the mathematical aspects of the theory of thermodynamics. The standard presentations of the subject are often beset by a number of obscurities associated with the words "state," "reversible," "irreversible," and "quasi-static." This book is written in the belief that such obscurities are best removed not by the formal axiomatization of thermodynamics, but by setting the theory in the wider context of a genuine field theory which incorporates the effects of heat conduction and intertia, and proving appropriate results about the governing...