Ali Hasan Nayfeh, University Distinguished Professor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

For seminal analytical and experimental contributions to nonlinear dynamics and structural mechanics

Professor Ali Hasan Nayfeh was born in Shuwaikah, Jordan, on 21 December 1933. After enrolling in 1959, he received B.S. in Engineering Science in 1962, M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1963, and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1964, all from Stanford University and all in a period of five years. After graduation, he worked at Heliodyne Corporation and Aerotherm Corporation. He then joined the faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1971, and has been a University Distinguished Professor of Engineering since 1976.

Thomas C.T. Ting, Professor Emeritus, the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Consulting Professor, Stanford University

For significant contributions to the development of the Stroh formalism of anisotropic elasticity, and to the analyses of several fundamental inelastic and wave propagation problems

Professor Thomas C.T. Ting received B.S. in Civil Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1956, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1962. He was appointed as Assistant Professor at Brown University between 1963 and 1965. He then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was promoted through the academic ranks to Professor in 1970. He has been Professor Emeritus since 2001. He has received visiting appointments at a number of universities, including National Taiwan University, The University of East Anglia, University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, Tongji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Sanford University.

Professor Chad M. Landis, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin

For outstanding contributions to the mechanics of active materials

Professor Chad Landis received his bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and business from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He then went on to earn his MS (1997) and PhD (1999) degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. After spending a year and a half at Harvard University as a post-doc, he then went to Rice University where he was a member of the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science faculty from 2000-2006. He is now an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ronald Rivlin has probably made the crucial contribution to shaping the discipline of Nonlinear Continuum Mechanics which underlies the modern powerful finite element software. Rivlin was decorated with many awards including the Timoshenko medal. Unfortunately, his Timoshenko speech is not available. Fortunately, Springer published two volumes of collected works of Rivlin. I extract an account of Rivlin's results and thoughts from the book and attach it on PDF. The reading of Rivlin is both interesting and instructive.

Dusan Krajcinovic received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Belgrade (1958, 1966) and his PhD in Civil Engineering from Northwestern University in 1968, working with Prof. George Hermann.

Dusan’s brilliant and successful career focused on mechanics of materials, and structural analysis and design. He worked at Ingersoll Rand Research Inc. (1969) and Argonne National Laboratory (1973), before becoming Professor of Civil Engineering at University of Illinois, Chicago, IL (1973-1989) and then Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU), until retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2004.

He pursued and inspired research with the discipline and passion typical of a professional athlete (when a youth, was a soccer player in Yugoslavia). A prolific writer, he co-authored over 200 publications, and published a book on damage mechanics, which is a comprehensive reference on the subject of continuum and discrete theories of damage mechanics (with over 700 pages).

2008-2009 Awards.  The AMD Executive Committee is now seeking nominations for the awards listed below. Detailed descriptions of the Society Level awards and procedures for nominations are indicated on the ASME website. http://www.asme.org/Governance/Honors/SocietyAwards/ Please submit a second copy of all nominations directly to D. J. Inman, AMD Chair, CIMSS MS 0261, 310 Durham Hall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, Phone: 540-231-4709, FAX: 540-231-2903, e-mail: dinman@vt.edu by the deadline of October 10, 2008 or sooner. Submission by e-mail is preferred.

The Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 awards.

I'm in Washington DC attending a small workshop entitled Understanding and Exploiting Nonlinearity.  Yesterday several talks described recent developments of nonlinear dynamics, the kind of phenomena that can be described by a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations.  Years ago, when the theory of chaos was in vogue, I looked at several textbooks on nonlinear dynamics, and tried to apply a few elementary ideas to evolving structures in materials.  This time I learned that many of the esoteric ideas of nonlinear dynamics have found applications in modeling natural phenomena and creating new devices.  Perhaps it is a good time to relearn nonlinear dynamics.

Brown University announced on May 6th 2008 that NUS president Shih Choon Fong is one of the seven honorary degree recipients in this year's commencement. The announcement reads as follows: 

In honor of its two recent National Medal of Science recipients, Jan Achenbach and Tobin Marks, Northwestern University held a National Medal of Science Symposium on May 14.

Achenbach and Marks received their medals at a White House ceremony in July 2007. The medal honors individuals for “pioneering scientific research in a range of fields, including physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral and engineering sciences, that enhances our understanding of the world and leads to innovations and technologies that give the United States its global economic edge.”

Anyone can   provide  a comprehensive lecture about orthotropic plate theory.

Zhigang, about defining "esthablished", I am worried people may consider arbitrary your "definition" -- not me, you can do as you like!

But look that even somebody as weak as me could be in the list you propose!!, and for different criteria! Only Nix and Hutchinson really stand high in the lists as "esthablished". Incidentally, congratulations: the most cited paper of Hutchinson is that with you.

ELSEVIER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE IN MECHANICS 

dear iMechanica friends

I came across a review of a paper by HD Bui who was somewhere in the internet, and I find it is very interesting. I could even have written this review myself !!  I don't think the reviewer exaggerates....

michele

Prof. Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Today, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Edward Hirsch announced that 190 new fellowships were choosen from more than 2,600 applicants (news ). Yonggang won the competition because of his achievement on atomistic-based continuum theory for nanomaterials. A complete list is here

James Monroe Gere, Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at Stanford University, died in Portola Valley, CA, on January 30, 2008. Jim Gere was born on June 14, 1925, in Syracuse, N.Y. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at age 17 in 1942, serving in England, France and Germany. After the war, he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1949 and 1951, respectively. He worked as an instructor and later as a Research Associate for Rensselaer between 1949 and 1952. He was awarded one of the first NSF Fellowships, and chose to study at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. in 1954 and was offered a faculty position in Civil Engineering, beginning a 34-year career of engaging his students in challenging topics in mechanics, and structural and earthquake engineering. He served as Department Chair and Associate Dean of Engineering and in 1974 co-founded the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford. In 1980, Jim Gere also became the founding head of the Stanford Committee on Earthquake Preparedness, which urged campus members to brace and strengthen office equipment, furniture and other contents items that could pose a life safety hazard in the event of an earthquake. That same year, he was invited as one of the first foreigners to study the earthquake-devastated city of Tangshan, China. Jim retired from Stanford in 1988 but continued to be a most valuable member of the Stanford community as he continued to give freely of his time to advise students and to guide them on various field trips to the California earthquake country.

This cover story in the recent issue of Harvard Magazine is about the work of Mahadevan.  How paint dries?  Why flags flutter?  How leaves fold?  Such questions of everyday objects have led Maha to pose mathematical questions, which often lead to surprisingly satisfying answers.  Many people have watched Maha demonstrate intriguing phenomena in his office.  If you haven't, do not miss this accompanying  short video of his performance.   

Keh-Chih Hwang (黄克智) was born on 21 July 1927, in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, China, in a family deeply rooted in Confucian tradition. His great-grandfather was a famous medical doctor in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. His grandfather, Xie Huang, passed the imperial examination in the late Qing Dynasty, and was awarded the title Xiu-Cai (秀才), as well as a lectureship in English and basic sciences at Nanchang Normal College. This position brought the family to Nanchang, where later K.C.’s father, Yi-Cheng Huang, would work at a post office for more than 40 years. K.C.’s mother, Shen-Xiu Gong, was a traditional Chinese wife with an intellectual background. She left no stone unturned for good education of her nine children, on a meager salary of her husband.

K.C.’s long life has been intertwined with major events in a turbulent world. During the Japanese invasion (1937-1945), the large Huang family was forced to drift from place to place in Jiangxi Province. K.C. had just finished primary school, and had to switch middle schools in three counties. The first school, Yangming School in Ji’an, was destroyed in an air raid in 1938. He often could not afford tuition and had to walk 50 km to school. The harsh life only made him more determined to excel. He finished middle school a year early, and entered the Provincial High School.

Prof. Zhigang Suo and Prof. Frans Spaepen, of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, have just been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  They are among 65 new members elected to the NAE in 2008.  Update:  Also elected this year is another mechanician, Robert Dodds, of the University of Illinois.

Update:  See a press release and photos.  Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, (January 14, 2008) – After an extensive international search among top academic research leaders, His Excellency Minister Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of Saudi Arabia and Chairman of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Board of Trustees, today announced that Professor Choon Fong Shih will be the Founding President of KAUST, the new world-class, graduate-level scientific research university now under development in Saudi Arabia. He is expected to assume his duties on 1 December 2008.

Professor Y. C. Fung, Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, is the recipient of the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize of 2007.

The Russ Prize is presented biannually to an outstanding candidate in the field of bioengineering who has made significant contributions to improving the human condition through research, development, teaching, or management. The recipient receives a $500,000 cash award and an engraved gold medallion.

Members of the International Mechanics Community

Dear Mechanics Colleagues,

As was reported in the Final Announcement of the forthcoming International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics to be held in Adelaide, Australia next August, two major prizes in mechanics will be awarded for the first time at the Congress. These are the G. K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Mechanics, sponsored by Cambridge University Press and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics, sponsored by Elsevier Ltd. and its journals in solid mechanics. Both prizes have been created in order to recognize major contributions by individuals to their respective branches of mechanics over the past 10 years. The purpose of this letter is to announce the decisions of the selection committees for these prizes.

Michael Ortiz, of the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories, of the California Institute of Technology, has won the Rodney Hill Prize.  The newly established Prize is sponsored by Elsevier Limited, awarded under the auspices of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM).  The award of US$25,000 will be presented at the 22nd International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, taking place in Adelaide in August 2008.

Howard Stone, of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has won the first Batchelor Prize.  The newly established Prize is sponsored by Cambridge University Press and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.  The award of US$25,000 will be presented at the International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM), taking place in Adelaide in August 2008.  Howard is iMechanica user number 96.