mechanician

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

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 13^th, 2007.

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.