Distributions of orientations on Stiefel manifolds

The Riemann space whose elements are m × k (m k) matrices X, i.e., orientations, such that X′X = I_k is called the Stiefel manifold V_k,m. The matrix Langevin (or von Mises-Fisher) and matrix Bingham distributions have been suggested as distributions on V_k,m. In this paper, we present some distributional results on V_k,m. Two kinds of decomposition are given of the differential form for the invariant measure on V_k,m, and they are utilized to derive distributions on the component Stiefel manifolds and subspaces of V_k,m for the above-mentioned two distributions. The singular value decomposition of the sum of a random sample from the matrix Langevin distribution gives the maximum likelihood estimators of the population orientations and modal orientation. We derive sampling distributions of matrix statistics including these sample estimators. Furthermore, representations in terms of the Hankel transform and multi-sample distribution theory are briefly discussed.     

On the geometric character of stress in continuum mechanics

This paper shows that the stress field in the classical theory of continuum mechanics may be taken to be a covector-valued differential two-form. The balance laws and other fundamental laws of continuum mechanics may be neatly rewritten in terms of this geometric stress. A geometrically attractive and covariant derivation of the balance laws from the principle of energy balance in terms of this stress is presented. Jerrold G. Marsden: Research partially supported by the California Institute of Technology and NSF-ITR Grant ACI-0204932.