Roderick MacIver's Heron Dance Art Studio: A Gift of Great Beauty, Wisdom, and Grace

Mohr's circle is a graphical method to determine an area's principal moments of inertia by plotting the moments and product of inertia on a rectangular coordinate system.

The kinetic energy of a particle is one-half of the product of the particle’s mass and the square of its speed. Note that just as Newton’s second law can be expressed as either the rate of change of momentum or mass multiplied by the rate of change of velocity, so too can the kinetic energy of a particle be expressed in terms of its mass and momentum, instead of its mass and velocity. 

The rotational kinetic energy of a body is equal to half the square of its angular speed and the moment of inertia.
This relationship between the rotational kinetic energy of a body and its angular speed implies that for the same angular speed, the rotational kinetic energy is greater if its moment of inertia is greater. Thus, more work needs to be done on the body to change its rotational kinetic energy and rotate it at a specific angular speed. Hence, the moment of inertia quantifies the...

Mohr's circle is a graphical method for determining an area's principal moments by plotting the moments and product of inertia on a rectangular coordinate system. This circle can also be used to calculate the orientation of the principal axes.
Consider a rectangular beam. The moments of inertia of the beam about the x and y axis are 2.5(107) mm4 and 7.5(107) mm4, respectively. The product of inertia is 1.5(107) mm4. Determine the principal moments of inertia and the orientation of the major and...

When a wave travels from one medium to another, it gets reflected at the boundary of the second medium. A common example of this is when a person yells at a distance from a cliff and hears the echo of their voice. The sound waves (longitudinal waves) traveling in the air are reflected from the bounding cliff. Similarly, flipping one end of a string whose other end is tied to a wall causes a pulse (transverse wave) to travel through the string, which gets reflected upon reaching the wall. In...

It’s plausible to suppose that the greater the velocity of a body, the greater effect it could have on other bodies. This does not depend on the direction of the velocity, only its magnitude. At the end of the seventeenth century, a quantity was introduced into mechanics to explain collisions between two perfectly elastic bodies, in which one body makes a head-on collision with an identical body at rest. When they collide, the first body stops, and the second body moves off with the...