Every student in engineering or in other fields of the applied sciences who has passed through his curriculum knows that the treatment of nonlin ear problems has been either avoided completely or is confined to special courses where a great number of different ad-hoc methods are presented. The wide-spread believe that no straightforward solution procedures for nonlinear problems are available prevails even today in engineering cir cles. Though in some courses it is indicated that in principle nonlinear problems are solveable by numerical methods the treatment of nonlinear problems, more or...