The first part of this paper describes some important underlying themes in the mathematical theory of continuum mechanics that are distinct from formulating and analyzing governing equations. The main part of this paper is devoted to a survey of some concrete, conceptually simple, pretty problems that help illuminate the underlying themes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the crucial role of invariant constitutive equations in computation.

The main result of this paper, Theorem 1.5, gives explicit formulae for the kernels of the ergodic decomposition measures for infinite Pickrell measures on the space of infinite complex matrices. The kernels are obtained as the scaling limits of Christoffel-Uvarov deformations of Jacobi orthogonal polynomial ensembles.

We consider reflector imaging in a weakly random waveguide. We address the situation in which the source is farther from the reflector to be imaged than the energy equipartition distance, but the receiver array is closer to the reflector to be imaged than the energy equipartition distance. As a consequence, the reflector is illuminated by a partially coherent field and the signals recorded by the receiver array are noisy. This paper shows that migration of the recorded signals cannot give a good image, but an appropriate migration of the cross correlations of the recorded signals can give a very good image. The resolution and stability analysis of this original functional shows that the reflector can be localized with an accuracy of the order of the wavelength even when the receiver array has small aperture, and that broadband sources are necessary to ensure statistical stability, whatever the aperture of the array.

Let G=(V,E) be a finite weighted graph, and Ω⊆V be a domain such that Ω^∘≠∅. In this paper, we study the following initial boundary problem for the non-homogenous wave equation ∂^2_t u(t,x) − Δ_Ω u(t,x) = f(t,x), (t,x)∈[0,∞)×Ω^∘ u(0,x)=g(x), x∈Ω^∘, ∂_t u(0,x)=h(x), x∈Ω^∘, u(t,x)=0, (t,x)∈[0,∞)×∂Ω, where Δ_Ω denotes the Dirichlet Laplacian on Ω^∘. Using Rothe's method, we prove that the above wave equation has a unique solution.

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