Paul Joseph

Hi there,

My name is Paul Joseph and I am the author of this blog. I did my Masters in Civil Engineering (Soil Mechanics) at MIT in the mid 80s. In 2010, I finished a Masters in Applied Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell), and in 2013 Fall, obtained my Ph.D.

Steady states are ubiquitous in nature and a mathematical framework (loosely called “dynamical systems theory”) exists to describe systems with a steady state. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is an example of a steady state generated by a dynamical system; mathematicians have extensively studied such dynamical systems.

In 1971, Steve Poulos at Harvard first described the steady-state condition in soils. Based on this I was able to show that soil shear can be described as a “dynamical system.”

A combination of basic scientific principles (steady-state, dynamical systems, Poisson process based simple friction) mark the advent of a new paradigm for describing soil deformation that is at once both simple and powerful. I call this new paradigm Dynamical Systems Soil Mechanics (DSSM for short). It is the only theory that predicts the linear semi-log relationship between the void-ratio and the vertical effective stress in one-dimensional compression, and not, as does other theory, simply take it as a given.

Looking back on my journey in soil mechanics, it seems nothing but the same old story–The Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit–that Nietzsche powerfully described in his classic Thus Spake Zarathustra. Thus during my undergraduate with Prof. Ramaswamy, at the University of Madras, Guindy, India, and then in graduate school at Purdue and MIT, I was like a camel, loading myself with knowledge. After MIT I wandered in the desert until at GEI, thanks to the nurturing kindness of Gonzalo Castro and Steve Poulos, I turned into a lion. For the next ten years I fought with the great dragon: “‘Thou-shalt,’ is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, ‘I will’.” And then, in the course of this struggle, I became like a child in soil mechanics: “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.”

I wonder how many of you will understand how exactly Nietzsche described this, my long (three decades) journey in soil mechanics—I myself understood this only recently, several years after it was all done.

Since 2008 my interests have expanded to the mathematical modeling of various problems in cognitive neuroscience/computer science. My first publication on this topic suggests that structures in our brain that handle emotions can work as a decision system that is independent of our analytical decision system. As best I know, the human animal is the only surviving animal (the Neanderthal may have been similar in this regard) that has two decision systems of roughly equal power built into its brain. The implications of this dual decision system are, I think, momentous–nothing short of empirical evidence for the basis of an internal Hegelian dialectic within us all.

I greatly enjoy the questions and comments I get so please continue to send these to me using the "Send Message" link on my CRC author page: https://www.crcpress.com/authors/i15908-paul-joseph

Sincerely

Paul G. Joseph Ph.D., P.E.