mechanician

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.

An updated Call for Nominations for the awards administered by the Applied Mechanics Division has been posted on the AMD website. Please nominate worthy candidates to these awards.

 A new award, named the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award will be awarded for the first time in 2008. In addition, the Applied Mechanics Division Award and the Young Investigator Award have been endowed by the friends of Ted Belytschko and Thomas J.R. Hughes respectively.

The governor of Virginia has asked President Bush to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to  Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who died trying to save his students during the mass killings at Virginia Tech.  Read more.

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Professor Jose E. Andrade from Northwestern University is the
recipient of the 2006 Zienkiewicz medal awarded biennially by the
Institution of Civil Engineers from London. The award goes to Andrade
for his contribution entitled ' Capturing strain localization in dense
sands with random density' in IJNME 2006; 67:1531-1564 DOI:
10.1002/nme.1673 (link: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/112519037/PDFSTART)

Our sincerest congratulations to Prof. Andrade!

Dusan Krajcinovic, retired professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Arizona State University, passed away on August 10, 2007, after a long illness.  Dusan was active in the mechanics community.  In addition to his teaching and research activities, he was a past member and chair of the Applied Mechanics Divison of ASME.  He also served a term on the U. S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. He authored the book Damage Mechanics published by North-Holland in 1996.  He will be missed by all those who knew him.

To: Engineers, Fracture Analysts, Mechanicians, Physicists...

In science and engineering, we have an excellent tradition: naming a physical unit using the name of a prominent personality from the concerned field. For example, in SI system, we measure force in newton, work in joule, power in watt...

But the unit of fracture toughness, i.e. KIC, is too lengthy to pronounce: (mega) pascal-underoot-meter. Further, it has also been in use for something like half a century by now, perhaps more. So, how do you like the idea of giving a name to this unit?

Jan D. Achenbach, Walter P. Murphy Professor and McCormick School Distinguished Professor at Northwestern University was presented a 2005 National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush on July 27. Achenbach, who  is well known in the mechanics community, was honored for his seminal contributions to engineering research and education in the area of wave propagation in solids and for pioneering the field of quantitative non-destructive evaluation. Previously, Achenbach received a 2003 National medal of Technology from President Bush.

Cambridge University Press and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics are delighted to announce the launch of The Batchelor Prize, sponsored by the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, to be awarded in recognition of outstanding research in fluid mechanics.

As a member society of the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) , the objective of the American Academy of Mechanics (AAM) is the advancement of the science and profession of mechanics.

The scope of AAM includes all of the disciplines involved in the modeling and study of the response of inanimate and animate matter to forces and environmental effects.

The Applied Mechanics Division, of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), administers 5 awards.  The 2007 recipients are

Assad Oberai wins the 2007 Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics. The Award will be presented at the Applied Mechanics Annual Dinner, during the ASME Congress, 11-15 November 2007, in Seattle.

A message from Woody Ju.  It is with deepest sadness and sorrow that I inform you that Professor T.H. Lin, our kindest role model and gentleman, passed away on June 18, 2007; he was 96 years old. Prof. Lin worked until last Friday.

He is survived by his sons (Prof. Robert Lin of UC Berkeley, Prof. Jim Lin of UCSD) and his daughter (Rita).

Professor Graeme Milton will be awarded the 2007 Prager medal from the Society of Engineering Science for his work on solid mechanics.  The medal will be handed out at the 44th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science (SES2007) to be held between October 21 and 24, 2007 at College Station, Texas.

The report about the iMechanica get-together with the McMat 2007 is definitely exciting, because we have found a community beyond the usual professional conferences we are familiar with.  Besides, we may have more, if not less, common interests and languages through this coordinated and yet diversified group with thousands of members in different places of this world.  It is indeed exciting to meet as friends you make from the Internet, except it is professionally:-)

Subra Suresh , the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is named the next dean of the School of Engineering, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Read more.