Bernard Budiansky, 73, died January 23, 1999 at his home in Lexington, MA. Dr. Budiansky was born in New York City and
received his B.C.E. in 1944 from City College of New York. He joined the Structures Research Division at Langley, quickly
becoming one of the preeminent researchers in that group. He earned his doctorate in applied mathematics from Brown
University in 1950. He was head of the structural mechanics branch from 1952 to 1955, when he left to join the faculty of
Harvard University. He was the Gordon McKay Professor of Structural Mechanics, Emeritus and the Abbot and James
Lawrence Professor of Engineering, Emeritus in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Budiansky was a theoretician in the fields of solid and structural mechanics. He published research papers on a wide
variety of subjects including buckling and post-buckling behavior, elasticity, plasticity, fracture mechanics, biomechanics,
and aeroelasticity. In recent years his work focused on mechanical behavior of composite materials, especially compressive
kinking of fiber-composites, and the tensile strength and toughness of ceramic-matrix composites reinforced by ductile
particles, transforming particles, and fibers. (He even worked on certain geophysical problems--the mechanics of rocks--in
connections with the development of earthquake prediction models.)
He continued to serve as an adviser to NASA. From 1966-1970 he was a member of NASA's research and technology
advisory subcommittee on aircraft structures and from 1974-1984 as a member of NASA's space systems and technology
advisory subcommittee. He has also served on boards for the National Research Council; the DARPA Materials Research
Council; and the U.S. National Committee on theoretical and applied mechanics.
Budiansky has won many honors including the AIAA 1970 Dryden Research Lecturer; CCNY 1974 Townsend Harris
Medal; ASCE 1982 von Karman Medal; Society of Engineering Science 1985 Eringen Medal; ASME 1989 Timoshenko
Medal. He has received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University 1986 and Technion Israel Institute of
Technology. In addition he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science; and the Danish Center for
Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. Professional affiliations included: ASCE, ASME, AIAA, and AGU.
Budiansky made a lengthy tribute to his mentors at Langley in his Acceptance Speech for the 1989 Timoshenko medal:
``To conclude these reflections, I would like to flip quickly through some verbal snapshots of a few of the people who have enriched my professional life. I had a remarkable trio of bosses in my first job in the Structures Research Division of NACA in 1944: Pai-Chuan Hu, a fresh Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Michigan, whose knowledge and intellect were awesome; Sam Batdorf, a renegade physicist, whose insightful way of thinking about problems in applied mechanics has been an enduring inspiration; and the big boss, the Chief of Structures Gene Lundquist, a great pioneer of structures research whose legacy as a research leader has been enduring. It was an exciting time at NACA, in those pre-space days of aeronautical research, and my experience there has left me fiercely supportive of scientific civil servants, who are at least as smart and hard-working as those in the private sector, but often are slandered by invidious comparisons. I was lucky to meet and even interact technically with some famous people at NACA outside my field of structures, like Ed Garrick, Carl Kaplan, and the great aerodynamicists Robert T. Jones and Adolph Busemann, who had independently conceived of swept wings for high-speed flight--Jones in America, Busemann in Germany. Jones told me how to calculate the lift on a swept wing, so that I could go on to study its aeroelasticity. Busemann got sufficiently interested in plasticity to join Lyell Sanders, John Hedgepeth and me in many happy hours of exploration of 6-dimensional stress space. Buseman had a marvelous, infectious technical vocabulary in English; an eavesdropper would have heard us earnestly discussing Humpty-Dumpties, meaning hyperspheres; stalactites, meaning hypervectors; and stalagmites, vectors pointing the other way!''
From Reflections by Bernard Budiansky,
published in the ASME Applied Mechanics Newsletter,
Spring 1990.
Comments and Suggestions to mech1@clifton.mech.northwestern.edu