This blog post was originally going to be about the fact that Robert Hooke knew that engineering systems were really non-linear, coupled with a slightly amateurish attempt to say that he’d have quite liked a non-linear FEA code. But when I was looking for a decent version of the picture I thought showed this, I found one with the graphs actually labeled, and there was no evidence that he knew about non-linearity. That was the end of the original blog post. The end of the original blog post, but the beginning of a search for what Hooke had actually said on the matter. After not very long I found, for the princely sum of nine dollars, a downloadable copy of Hooke's original paper on his law of elasticity “De Potentia Restitutiva”, or “Of spring”.
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