A Review of Research Before 1953

The first results on the topic of contact problems in the theory of elasticity were obtained at the end of the 19th century. After that, little work was done on these problems until the last 20 years (1933–1953). Most of the work was carried out in the Soviet Union. A number of articles published elsewhere often repeated results obtained by Soviet scientists. We shall begin by reviewing articles devoted to plane contact problems, and then to three-dimensional ones.