Professor Horacio Espinosa at Northwestern University is awarded the 2007 Society of Engineering Sciences (SES) Young Investigator Medal in recognition of his outstanding work in the field of Engineering Science and Nanomaterials. For more information on Professor Espinosa's research, please visit his group website.
(A message from Dave Barnett) George Herrmann passed away yesterday in Switzerland -- quickly, quietly, and peacefully.
Attached is an article by Jia-shi Yang in memory of Professor Mindlin. It will be presented at the Fifth International Conference on Nonlinear Mechanics at Shanghai, China, June 11-14, 2007.
A new website has been recently created for the centennial of Professor Raymond Mindlin. In addition, the Engineering Mechanics Division of ASCE has launched an effort to establish the Mindlin Medal of Applied Mechanics. The goal is to raise about $30,000 to setup an endowment at ASCE.
Department of Engineering Mechanics
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Lambert Ben Freund (LBF) was born on November 23, 1942, in Johnsburg, Illinois, a tiny rural community of a few hundred people in the northeast corner of the state. This part of the Midwest was opened to European settlement by the Black Hawk War of the 1830s. A small delegation of his ancestors arrived in the area in 1841. The enthusiastic letters they wrote to relatives waiting in Bavaria and the Rhineland resulted in rapid settlement of the area by immigrant families in the mid-1800s.
Presented at the Applied Mechanics Dinner of the 2006 Winter Annual Meeting of ASME, Hilton Chicago Hotel, 9 November 2006.
First and formost, I must acknowledge with gratitude the honour of being selected for the Timoshenko medal for 2006. But since a speech is now expected, I realise that this is not free lunch. If you know a good pub, this would be a good time to slip away.
When I received Virgil Carter's letter informing me that I had been selected, I could not believe it. There must have been a mistake; after all Johnson is a very common name. I am reminded of my first meeting with Bernie Budiansk from Harvard, also a Timoshenko medallist. He asked, "Did you write that book on vibration with Bishop?" "No. That was Dan Johnson"; " Did you edit that British Journal of mechanical sciences?": "No. That was Bill Johnson"; "Who the hell are you!"
Anyone interested in the history of mechanical technology might find interesting the series that I have published in Mechanical Engineering magazine.
Galileo’s Telescope Lenses
http://www.memagazine.org/oct06/features/clearas/clearas.html
Atmospheric Railway
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/feb06 /features/tallyho/tallyho.html
Sources of Inspiration
Text of Timoshenko Medal acceptance speech delivered at the Applied Mechanics Dinner of the 1988 Winter Annual Meeting of ASME in Chicago, Illinois.
I should like, first and foremost, to express my deep appreciation to the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME for the honor they have done me in awarding the Timoshenko Medal for 1988. Any scientist or engineer waged in research in mechanics, even one with the minimum of vanity, would be delighted and thrilled to have his work recognized by an award with such high prestige. In past years the Timoshenko medal has gone to some of the outstanding scientists of this century. As we have heard from Professor Leibovich, the inaugural award 31 years ago was to Stephen Timoshenko himself, and in the following year there was a bumper crop of three medalists: Arpad Nadai, distinguished for his work in plasticity, and those two giants of fluid and solid mechanics, Theodore von Karman and Geoffrey Taylor. The last-named of these medalists was my mentor and teacher, and the little I know about the doing of research in fluid mechanics was learned from him. I also had the privilege of editing the four volumes of Taylor's collected scientific papers, and this left me with a profound admiration and respect for his insight, originality and capacity for scientific discovery. My feelings about von Karman are similar, although I did not know him as well. I intend no disrespect for ASME when I say that the standard of the Timoshenko medalists has undoubtedly slipped a little over the past 31 years. My friend Bill Sears has done a brilliant job of covering up that decline, and I thank him warmly for his kind remarks while not believing all of them.
Comments on Discovery and Invention
Text of a talk delivered at the Applied Mechanics Dinner of the 1986 Winter Annual Meeting of ASME in Anaheim, California.
With regard to the topic of these comments, I was told that a title of some kind was mandatory so I gave a title which seemed reasonably impressive. Upon reflection, I have little to offer in the way of comments which are correspondingly impressive. It occurred to me that the forward motion of a crack in a structural material might be of some interest as a descriptive model. A 1950 technical paper, by Kies, Sullivan, and Irwin, reported that progressive fracturing usually occurs by the development and joining of advance separations and that these local behaviors tend to be rather abrupt. By use of motivation as a driving force and by substituting "advance ideas" for "advance separations," a plausible descriptive model of forward technological progress seemed possible. Of course, details related to the development and joining of advance ideas would be needed. These would include motivation, opportunity, guidance, and information exchange. In his 1985 Timoshenko Medal comments, Sternberg noted certain research management features which are not helpful. The conditions one likes for best progress certainly include benign methods of research management. After additional reflection on these and other complexities related to innovative progress, I decided that the descriptive model I had thought to develop was unlikely to be useful. So my comments will have a different nature. They will be memories and historic fragments related to my topic and they will be restricted to the strength of materials field.
