“…These theorems are well known in the literature for a wide class of constitutive laws, like perfect plasticity, linearly and nonlinearly hardening materials, either with a stress-space bounding surface, or with a hardening saturation surface, and so on. It is not the purpose of the present paper to review this literature; it will suffice to mention a few representative papers and books with their reference lists, namely: Koiter (1960), Débordes and Nayroles (1976), Halphen (1979), Martin (1975), Zarka and Casier (1979), Gokhfeld and Cherniavsky (1980), Ceradini (1980), Kö nig and Maier (1981), Polizzotto (1982Polizzotto ( , 1984bPolizzotto ( , 1993, Ponter and Karadenitz (1985), Kö nig (1987), Stein et al (1992Stein et al ( , 1993, Stumpf (1993), Nayroles and Weichert (1993), Kamenjarzh andMerzljakov (1994), Mró z et al (1995), Pham (1996Pham ( , 2003Pham ( , 2005, Maier et al (2000), Maier (2001), Ponter (2002), Maier (2000, 2002), Feng and Sun (2007).…”