Abstract

This talk coincides with the publication by Cambridge University Press of “The Geometry of Equilibrium: James Clerk Maxwell and 21st-Century Structural Mechanics”, edited by Bill Baker and Allan McRobie. Bill is Senior Partner at Skidmore Owings and Merrill in Chicago and has been the design lead for many of the world’s iconic structures, including the world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Bill is Honorary Professor here at CUED and visits each year to give a fourth-year module on Advanced Structural Design. The new book collates the recent work of Bill, Allan and many others which revisits the works of James Clerk Maxwell. Alongside his famous unification of electricity and magnetism, Maxwell also provided a highly geometric approach to structural mechanics. In this talk, Allan will: describe the contents of the book, focusing on the mathematics of 3D and 4D projective geometry, with the polarities and Legendre transforms that underpin the geometry of equilibrium; explain the applications in design; describe the more recent progress.