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Which scientists helped develop the concepts of elasticity, stress, and strain?

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Figure 1: The position vector x and the velocity vector v of a material point, the body force fdV acting on an element dV of volume, and the surface force TdS acting on an element dS of surface in a Cartesian coordinate system 1, 2, 3 (see text).
mechanics of solids Figure 1: The position vector x and the velocity vector v of a material point, the body force fdV acting on an element dV of volume, and the surface force TdS acting on an element dS of surface in a Cartesian coordinate system 1, 2, 3 (see text).

The development of the concepts of elasticity, stress, and strain was a collaborative effort spanning several centuries, involving many prominent scientists and mathematicians.1

  • Early Foundations: Robert Hooke discovered in 1660 that displacement under load is proportional to force, establishing the basis for linear elasticity. Edme Mariotte later contributed to understanding how beams resist transverse loadings.12
  • Formalizing Stress and Strain: Jakob Bernoulli first proposed describing deformation as force per unit area (stress) relative to elongation (strain). Leonhard Euler later proposed the linear relationship σ=Eϵ, with the coefficient E eventually named Young’s modulus after Thomas Young.13
  • Refinement and Generalization: Charles-Augustin Coulomb related beam theory to stress and strain, while Antoine Parent introduced shear stress. Finally, Augustin-Louis Cauchy formalized stress as a tensor and established the generalized three-dimensional theory of linear elastic response in 1822.14