It's perhaps the second week of your introductory physics course. Your instructor starts talking about friction and writes the following two formulas on the board. Then there is probably some sort of ...

Friction is a pervasive nonlinearity in mechanical systems, arising at interfaces from the microscale asperities of surfaces and manifesting in macroscopic performance degradation, wear and control ...

The upper figure shows the viscoelastic toy model proposed here, characterized by only six independent parameters. Surprisingly, this simple mechanical model produces complicated system dynamics, as ...