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.

The American Academy of Mechanics is pleased to announce that
Jacob Fish, the Rosalind and John J. Redfern Chaired Professor of Engineering at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Martin Ostoja-Starzewski, Professor of
Mechanical Science & Engineering at University of Illinois have both been
elected as Fellows of the Academy. They will be presented with certificates
honoring their new status at the first AAM Summer Conference to be held from
June 17-20, 2008.

In preparing cases for faculty appointments, my colleagues in other fields often ask about citations of each candidate and his or her comparees.  Despite obvious resistance, my colleagues give following reasons:

At the 2007 ASME Congress, in Seattle, Professor Wing Kam Liu won the 2007 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award.  Wing Kam was a past chair of the Applied Mechanics Division, and has made seminal contributions in the field of computational mechanics.

Rather than scratching heads when faced with a seemingly impossible contradiction in a job, engineers could do worse than apply the Triz theory.

There has been quite a buzz around Triz, the Russian theory of problem solving, for some time. Since it was fully refined in the mid-1980s its use has been slowly spreading as word gets round, much like the increasing popularity of a political movement.

Applied Mechanics Division Banquet, Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, Washington, November 13th, 2007.

I would like to begin by thanking the members of the Timoshenko Medal Committee, consisting of the five members of the Applied Mechanics Division Executive Committee, Ravi-Chandar, Dan Inman, Zhigang Suo, Tayfun Tezduyar, and Ares Rosakis, the five previous chairs of the Executive Committee, Tom Farris, Wing Kam Liu, Mary Boyce, Pol Spanos, and Stelios Kyriakides, and the five previous Timoshenko Medalists, Ken Johnson, Grisha Barenblatt, Mort Gurtin, Ben Freund, and John Hutchinson. As a former member of the Executive Committee, I completed my ten-year tenure on the Timoshenko Committee the year before last, and now I will have the opportunity to return for another five years. Actually, I am looking forward to it. I enjoyed my time on the Executive and Medal Committees, and the opportunity to work with outstanding mechanicians, such as Carl Herakovich, Stan Berger, Lallit Anand, Alan Needleman, the late Dusan Krajcinovic, and many others. I also want to thank everyone in attendance here tonight.

This award is a great honor. Frankly, I am thrilled to receive it, but I am also humbled by it. The previous recipients represent a who’s who of twentieth century engineering science. It is quite an incredible club to join. I promise to do my best to live up to the standard as I continue my scientific work.

我国著名力学家、中国力学学会原常务理事、甘肃省力学学会原理事长、甘肃省政协原常委
、甘肃省科协原常委、兰州大学力学专业和学科的创始人、兰州大学力学系首任主任、名誉
主任叶开沅先生因病医治无效，于2007年10月20日15时30分在北京不幸逝世，享年82岁。
　　叶开沅，男，汉族，1926年5月19日出生于浙江省衢州市。1938年至1943年，在浙江省
立衢州中学学习。1944年，到北京灯市口育英中学学习。1945年考入北京大学土木工程系，
旋即转入燕京大学数学系学习。1946年，进入唐山工程学院学习，1947年转入清华大学电机