Alan Needleman's scientific career started out from a void—literally. A void branched out into various directions and continued to seed many new developments in computational mechanics of materials. In fact, at the age of 70, but still very much active and inspiring as ever, Alan Needleman is the proud founder of several “schools” or “families.” This special issue is an account of the symposium on “New Frontiers in the Mechanics of Materials,” which was held August 5–8, 2014 at the Mines ParisTech premises in Paris.
Alan Needleman obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970, under supervision of Professor John Hutchinson. His first article, taken from his thesis, is on “Void growth in an Elastic–Plastic Medium” and was published here in Ref. [1], the Journal of Applied Mechanics, in 1972. The topics in this paper—periodic array of voids, large deformation plasticity, and nonlinear finite element computation—laid the...
