1.1. It is often necessary in nuclear physics research to know the distribution in amplitude of a series of electrical impulses. An instrument which reveals this distribution directly is called a ‘pulse-amplitude analyser’, or, in the jargon of the late war, when the problem of building such an instrument was first seriously considered, a ‘kick sorter’. Many kick sorters have been described or discussed ((1)—(16)), and many new types are at present under development.

This paper is mainly concerned with the distribution of stress near a flat elliptical crack in a body of infinite extent under a uniform tension at infinity perpendicular to the plane of the crack. After an analytical solution of this problem was found the authors received a copy of a paper by Sadowsky and Sternberg (3) in which they solved the more general problem of the stress concentration around a tri-axial ellipsoidal cavity in an elastic body of infinite extent, the body at infinity being in a uniform state of stress whose principal axes are parallel to the axes of the cavity. The method of solution adopted by the present writers for the special case of the elliptical crack is somewhat different from the more general work of Sadowsky and Sternberg, and is, moreover, surprisingly simple, so it seems to be of value to present this solution here.

In this paper, Fourier integrals are used to solve some elastic problems of generalized plane stress and small transverse displacements in infinitely long, rectangular, isotropic plates stressed only at their edges. The Airy stress function and the transverse displacement satisfy the two-dimensional bi-harmonic equation, and the basic mathematical problem is to solve this equation subject to different sets of boundary conditions. Little attention has been given hitherto to problems in which some of the boundary conditions depend directly upon displacements. Here the general problem is solved when one long edge is fixed, and stresses or displacements are arbitrarily prescribed at the other, with no stresses and displacements at infinity. The problem of a concentrated edge force is discussed in detail and numerical values of the stresses at the fixed edge are given.

It is shown that all the classical thermodynamical properties and the equation of state of a rectilinear assembly of spherical molecules with short-range attractive forces acting only between neighbours can be derived from a single partition function which is an analytic function of the pressure and the temperature. The thermodynamical functions are simply related to the Laplace transform of the function e−E(x)/(kT), where E(x) is the interaction energy between two neighbouring molecules. Although this linear model behaves like a perfect gas at high temperatures and like a crystal near the absolute zero, there are no critical phenomena, owing to the analytic character of the partition function. It is, however, pointed out that at very low temperatures the slope of the isothermal curves can suffer extremely sharp changes which may be interpreted as changes of phase, and this point is illustrated by an example.

Finally, I should like to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. H. Jones for his guidance of this work and for his invaluable advice throughout. My thanks are also due to the Turkish Ministry of Education for the award of a scholarship.