Elastic plates form a class of very important mechanical structures that appear in a wide range of practical applications, from building bodies to microchip production. As the sophistication of industrial designs has increased, so has the demand for greater accuracy in analysis. This in turn has led modelers away from Kirchoff's classical theory for thin plates and toward increasingly refined models that yield not only the deflection of the middle section, but also account for transverse shear deformation. The improved performance of these models is achieved, however, at the expense of a much...

Variational and boundary integral equation techniques are two of the most useful methods for solving time-dependent problems described by systems of equations of the form 2 ? u = Au, 2 't 2 where u = u(x, t) is a vector-valued function, x is a point in a domain inR or 3 R, and A is a linear elliptic di?erential operator. To facilitate a better und- standing of these two types of methods, below we propose to illustrate their mechanisms in action on a speci?c mathematical model rather than in a more impersonal abstract setting. For this purpose, we have chosen the hyperbolic system of partial...

Variational and boundary integral equation techniques are two of the most useful methods for solving time-dependent problems described by systems of equations of the form 2 ? u = Au, 2 't 2 where u = u(x, t) is a vector-valued function, x is a point in a domain inR or 3 R, and A is a linear elliptic di?erential operator. To facilitate a better und- standing of these two types of methods, below we propose to illustrate their mechanisms in action on a speci?c mathematical model rather than in a more impersonal abstract setting. For this purpose, we have chosen the hyperbolic system of partial...