Gury Kolosov

Gury Vasilievich Kolosov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician and engineer. He is best known for his contributions to the theory of elasticity. In 1907 Kolosov derived the solution for stresses around an elliptical hole in a solid material governed by the mathematical theory of elasticity. He showed that the concentration of stress could become far greater, as the radius of curvature at an end of the hole becomes small compared with the overall length of the hole.

Brittle fracture in the form of crack growth is governed by the stress field around the crack tip and by parameters that describe the resistance of the material to crack growth. Thus, the analysis of stress near the crack tip constitutes an essential part of fracture mechanics. ... Among various mathematical methods in plane elasticity, the complex potential function method by Kolosov and Muskhelishvili is one of the most powerful and convenient methods to treat two-dimensional crack problems. In the complex potential method, stresses and displacements are expressed in terms of analytic functions of complex variables. The problem of obtaining stresses and displacements around a crack tip is converted to finding some analytic functions subjected to appropriate boundary conditions.