Within the framework of a 6-parameter nonlinear shell theory, with strain measures of Cosserat type, constitutive relations are proposed for thin elastic composite shells. The material law is expressed in terms of five engineering constants of classical anisotropic continuum plus an additional parameter accounting for drilling stiffness. The theory allows for unlimited displacements and rotations. A number of examples are presented...

We present a short proof that if two gradient maps on the twodimensional disc have the same degree, then they are gradient homotopic.

A multiplicative structure in the cohomological versjon of Conley index is described . In the case of equivariant flows we apply the normalization procedure known from equivariant degree theory and we propose a new continuation invariant. The theory is then applied to obtain a mountain pass type theorem. Another application is a result on multiple bifurcations for some elliptic PDE.

Consider the Euclidean space Rn with the orthogonal action of a compact Lie group G. We prove that a locally Lipschitz G-invariant mapping f from Rn to R can be uniformly approximated by G-invariant smooth mappings g in such a way that the gradient of g is a graph approximation of Clarke’s generalized gradient of f . This result enables a proper development of equivariant gradient degree theory for a class of set-valued gradient...