Search results for "Virtual Works"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
The role of virtual work in Levi-Civita's parallel transport
2015
International audience; According to current history of science, Levi-Civita introduced parallel transport solely to give a geometrical interpretation to the covariant derivative of absolute differential calculus. Levi-Civita, however, searched a simple computation of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold, basing on notions of the Italian school of mathematical physics of his time: holonomic constraints, virtual displacements and work, which so have a remarkable, if not dominant, role in the origin of parallel transport.
On the History of Differentiable Manifolds
2012
International audience; We discuss central aspects of history of the concept of an affine dif-ferentiable manifold, as a proposal confirming the need for using some quantitative methods (drawn from elementary Model Theory) in Mathematical Historiography. In particular, we prove that this geometric structure is a syntactic rigid designator in the sense of Kripke-Putnam.