The perfect Valentine’s Day gift for a scientist? A juicy problem to solve. We recommend:
“Love’s Problem,” Janet M. Becker and Michael Bevis, Geophysical Journal International, vol. 156, no. 2, February 2004, p. 171. The authors, who are at the University of Hawaii, explain that:
“Explicit expressions for the displacements generated in a non-gravitating, homogeneous, semi-infinite half-space by uniform surface pressure applied over a rectangular region are presented. These complement expressions for the associated stress field given by Love in 1929.”
The article is online (for subscribers of Geophysical Journal International, anyway) here. And if you can’t access the online version of that earthiest of journals? Head to the nearest research library, and grab the paper version.
(Thanks to Investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)