Professor R.L. Taylor has more than 60 years of experience in the modelling and simulation of structures and solid continua including eighteen years in industry. He is Professor of the Graduate School and the Emeritus T.Y. and Margaret Lin Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and also Corporate Fellow at Dassault Systèmes Americas Corp. in Johnston, Rhode Island. In 1991 he was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Engineering in recognition of his educational and research contributions to the field of computational mechanics. Professor Taylor is a Fellow of the US Association for Computational Mechanics – USACM (1996) and a Fellow of the International Association of Computational Mechanics – IACM (1998). He has received numerous awards including the Berkeley Citation, the highest honour awarded by the University of California, Berkeley, the USACM John von Neumann Medal, the IACM Gauss–Newton Congress Medal and a Dr.-Ingenieur ehrenhalber awarded by the Technical University of Hannover, Germany. Professor Taylor has written several computer programs for finite element analysis of structural and non-structural systems, one of which, FEAP, is used world-wide in education and research environments. A personal version, FEAPpv, available on GitHub, is incorporated into this book.