Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III (1919-2000) was born in Los Angeles, California, on February 18, 1919. He was educated at the California Institute of Technology (B.S., mathematics and physics, l941; M.S., mathematics, 1942), Brown University (Certificate in Mechanics, 1942), and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1943). Truesdell worked briefly at the University of Michigan, the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Naval Ordnance and Research Laboratories, before taking positions at Indiana University (1950-1961) and The Johns Hopkins University (l961-1989). Truesdell's primary research interest was rational mechanics, a branch of mathematics involving the mathematical formulation and deductive study of the concepts of mechanics. He published numerous books and papers in several areas of rational mechanics, including continuum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics. Truesdell wrote extensively on the history of rational mechanics, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He founded three journals:
Papers are chiefly drafts and proofs of Truesdell's publications, often with several drafts of the same publication. Few publications prior to 1965 are represented; unpublished manuscripts date to 1942. Also included are lists and texts of public lectures and notes on Truesdell's courses, both dating to 1942, and Truesdell's student class notes. Biographical and autobiographical writings and reminiscences by and about Truesdell are included, along with summaries of Truesdell's correspondence with his associates J. L. Ericksen, W. Noll, and R. A. Toupin. Included are correspondence, lecture and course notes, lists of publications and lectures, drafts, galley and page proofs, grant proposals, reports, reprints, and photographs. The collection was transferred in l984 from the American Institute of Physics Niels Bohr Library in New York. The container list was prepared by Truesdell and constitutes a commentary on the papers.
Forms part of the Archives of American Mathematics.
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C. Truesdell Papers, 1939-1989, Archives of American Mathematics, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
Organized by Truesdell into sixteen series:
Truesdell's papers were transferred to the Archives of American Mathematics from the American Institute of Physics Center for the History of Physics in 1984.
Note that this inventory was prepared by Truesdell himself and many entries include personal comments on the materials in his collection.
The postscript on the fifth draft, deleted here, was later restored. At my request the second draft was refereed and checked for correctness by someone unconnected with Noll or me. When I discovered that Rivlin and his sycophants made a different error in each of their papers, I recalled the accepted manuscript for revision. The final draft was also, at my request, checked and refereed.
Notes on the course first given in 1950/1951 and more or less biennially for more than twenty years thereafter; after the first time these notes were simultaneously drafts of a book of the same title, never completed as such.
This course was my first course at Indiana University. The topic
had been requested by Gilbarg. Among the students in 1950-1951 were Serrin and
Ericksen. The final examination is bound in at the end of the notes. On that
examination Serrin did original research on the methods of Hilbert and Enskog
and got the grade A+. Noll and Morgenstern studied these notes, especially in
my seminar in the summer of 1954, and Morgenstern followed the course itself in
1954-1955, during which Morgenstern improved Khichin's proof of Boltzmann's
law. Noll's paper "Die Herleitung der Grundgleichungen der Thermomechanik der
Kontinua aus der statistischen Mechanik," 1955, grew from a report he gave in
the seminar of 1954; so did the two papers by Morgenstern, and so did several
papers by Ikenberry. This course and related seminars gave rise to all of my
papers in its field, including:
Still in my hands are the notes of the last version of the course itself, which I had hoped to write up some day as an elementary introduction to the material in publications number 121 and 224 along with an exposition of some of the more recent researches on equilibrium statistics.
While writing the fifth draft, here preserved, I came to think that Reech's ideas could form the basis of a modern axiomatic treatment. That idea led eventually to the book by Bharath and me, Concepts and Logic, publication number 213, drafts of which are included in another part of this collection. From 1973 onward I developed both books alternatingly. Between 1973 and 1979 the manuscript The Tragicomical History went through many drafts, at least four. Each of those was made by altering the sheets of the preceding draft. Numbers eight, nine and ten, preserved by accident, provide specimens.
The text of this book is of three origins: 1. Truesdell's ideas deriving from the notes for his lectures for his biennial course, beginning in the august of 1950, from his publications number 45 (1952), 78 and 79 (1956), 170 (1960) and 124 (1977) and his multiplied lectures at Rio de Janeiro (see below). 2. Mucaster's Ph.D. thesis at Johns Hopkins (see below) 3. Work done by Truesdell and Mucaster in collaboration starting in 1973 or 1974 and continuing through the page proofs of the book. Much of the material went through ten to twenty drafts, or even more. Each draft was made by correcting the sheets of the preceding draft, and at each stage the old manuscript was destroyed.
[For publication numbers see list of published works in Box 39, folder 1]