 | | Mechanics of Solids
A Journal of Russian Academy of Sciences | | Founded
in January 1966
Issued 6 times a year
Print ISSN 0025-6544
Online ISSN 1934-7936 |
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| "The 90th Birthday of Academician Yurii Nikolaevich Rabotnov," Mech. Solids. 39 (1), 171-172 (2004) |
| Year |
2004 |
Volume |
39 |
Number |
1 |
Pages |
171-172 |
| Title |
The 90th Birthday of Academician Yurii Nikolaevich Rabotnov |
| Author(s) |
|
| Abstract |
Yurii Nikolaevich Rabotnov (1914-1985) is an outstanding scientist
of the 20th century in the field of mechanics of solids. He obtained fundamental results
in virtually all areas of the science of strength-the theory of stability,
mechanics of fracture, hereditary theory of creep, mechanics of composite
materials, and the theory of plasticity. His last book-the university
textbook Mechanics of Solids-has become an encyclopedia for
undergraduate and graduate students, engineers, and scientists.
Although this book has run into several editions, it is difficult to
find it on the shelves in bookstores, but it stands on the bookshelf
of almost every teacher of the strength of materials. High
level general and mathematical
culture, extremely wide erudition, and reasonable combination of theoretical
rigor with thorough experiment permitted him even during his life-time
to rank with such recognized classics as S. P. Timoshenko, A. N. Krylov,
N. I. Muskhelishvili, and V. V. Novozhilov. The unflagging interest in his
ideas and books confirms this. The hereditary theory of plasticity is continuing
to be developed. The version of the engineering theory of shells proposed
by Rabotnov is widely utilized. Damage mechanics, the huge area of science
that is being rapidly developed all over the world, has arisen from
the fundamental studies by Kachanov and Rabotnov in which they suggested
the structural parameters to be introduced into the equations of state
and constitutive relations. He had a rare combination of the talent
of scientist with the talent of teacher. In his absence, he was called
a formalizer of genius. He was capable of grinding the statement of the
problem and the basic results to make these an attractive subject matter of
study for his students. His ability to simplify the problem not by
vulgarizing it but by separating the essence from less important details
attracted to him both young and mature scientists. It is not accidental that
his first book, Strength of Materials, and his last book, Mechanics of Solids, are textbooks. V. V.Novozhilov called Strength of Materials a pearl among the books on strength. These books, together with
the world-famous Creep of Structural Elements, are the major landmarks
in the great area of science that was highlighted and clarified by his
talent.
Yu. N. Rabotnov was born in 1914 in Nizhni Novgorod. His father was a teacher
in a gymnasium and a member of St. Petersburg Astronomical Society. From
his mother he inherited an interest in studying foreign languages.
He delivered his lectures in France in brilliant "nuanced" French,
made his presentations in Great Britain in English and in Germany in German.
This love to languages originated from his brilliantly organized brain.
He said that he studied various languages as if solving problems of logic,
searching for unknown laws and relationships. He was able to translate
the scientific literature from Polish, Czech, Georgian, and Rumanian.
His Russian was much admired for melodiousness, fineness, and
accuracy of phrases. His discussions in science serve as unforgettable
examples of mastering the word and thought. In his review of a book
of one scientist who was immoderately fruitful and indiscriminate in co-authors,
he wrote: "The notion of the mechanics and mathematics culture is hardly
amenable to the exact definition but its absence is always apparent for
an expert." Being a hereditary Russian intellectual, Rabotnov was extremely
careful in his scientific language. In the last years of his life,
when answering some remarks on his book, he seriously explained
that he preferred the complex sentence to the compound sentence,
following the tradition that goes back to Gogol and Shchedrin.
Rabotnov had a great talent of mathematician and fundamental education
combined with keen love of science and the ability to achieve his goals.
He graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow
State University when he was 21. In his 32, he defended his D.Sc (Doctor
of Sciences) dissertation and became a professor of Moscow University.
In his 38, he was appointed the Dean of the Department of Mechanics
and Mathematics and organized the Chair of Plasticity which he headed
until the last years of his life. He was elected a Corresponding Member
of the USSR Academy of Sciences in his 39 and a Full Member (Academician)
in his 44.
An important part of his life in science was associated with
Akademgorodok (Science Town) of the Siberian Branch of the USSR
Academy of Sciences. He was the Deputy Head of the Scientific Center,
the head of a laboratory at the Institute of Hydrodynamics,
and the head of a chair at Novosibirsk University. A combination
of the research activity with teaching of students and many years'
personal work with young scientists permitted him to bring up several
dozen of talented scientists. These scientists have become Doctors of Sciences
and are successfully working in science. They all are proud to associate
themselves with Rabotnov's scientific school. Among these
scientists are I. F. Obraztsov, B. D.Annin, S. A. Shesterikov, N. I. Malinin,
O. V. Sosnin, Yu. V. Nemirovskii, S. T. Mileiko, Yu. M. Tarnapol'skii,
V. P. Tamuzh, E. V. Lomakin, Yu. V. Suvorova, V. I. Astaf'ev,
G. I. Bryzgalin, A. V. Berezin, A. A. Movchan, A. N. Polilov, L. P. Yusupov,
and many others. In 1965, he returned to Moscow University to his chair of
plasticity. He preserved his faith to the idea of fertilizing combination of
the theory and experiment and to the cooperation of universities with the
Academy of Sciences. The latter concept is being implemented now under
support of the Federal Program Integratsiya (Integration). Since 1965, he had
headed the Laboratory of Strength of Engineering Materials at the Mechanical
Engineering Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Later he
renamed this laboratory to the Laboratory of Fracture Mechanics and then to
the Laboratory of Mechanics of Composite Materials, in accordance with the
subjects that seemed him to be of greatest importance. His astonishing
ability to generate and comprehend new ideas and to feel prospects of new
fine problems allowed him even at the earliest stage of the development of
new scientific concepts to predict that it were the fracture mechanics and
mechanics of composite materials that would become the most fruitful and
demanded fields in solid mechanics. After Rabotnov's death, the Mechanical
Engineering Research Institute published his selected papers under the title
Topical Issues of Solid Mechanics. The papers for this book
were selected on the basis of a simple criterion - they should be written
by him alone, without co-authors. Strikingly, almost all these
papers have opened a new area of science. Usually, he matured his concepts
for a long time before giving birth to them, carefully grinded the presentation
of the material and the mathematical rigor of the models, and then generously
dispensed his results among his colleagues and students who subsequently
developed these.
Rabotnov made a great contribution to the engineering theory of shells,
which has been noted in numerous publications devoted to him. He discovered
the edge effect and local buckling in elastic shells. The couple stress free
state of such shells can be considered in terms of the special
coordinates that do not coincide with the principal curvatures.
He constructed a 2D model for elastoplastic media and applied
this to solve the problem of bending of a tube that modeled
a hardening material with a singular (conical) loading surface.
He investigated the buckling of beams beyond the elastic limit,
constructed a model of the medium with delayed yield limit,
and solved a number of problems of propagation of waves in such media.
He created the modern theory of creep that involved Volterra-Boltzmann's
integral equations with hereditary-type difference kernels. This contribution
is commonly recognized as one of his major results. He proposed
the resolvent (invertible) fractional-exponential kernel and developed
the operator algebra for such kernels. These results are presented
in his monograph Fundamentals of the Hereditary Mechanics of Solids
that has been translated into English.
This monograph enhances Tables of Fractional-exponential Functions
of Negative Parameters and Integrals for these Functions,
that were published previously. These tables can serve as handbooks on
trigonometric and elliptic integrals for the creep design of highly loaded
elements. Many practical applications and the engineering theory of
hereditary-type creep that takes into account the nonlinear behavior of
the instantaneous strain diagram are presented in the book
Short-term Creep by Yu. N. Rabotnov and S. T. Mileiko.
The Russian translation of his lectures in France was published
under the title An Introduction to Fracture Mechanics.
This book is small in volume and the number of copies but
brilliant in style and
richness of ideas.
His Lectures on Elasticity published by Moscow State University
provide the most rigorous presentation of the modern theory of elasticity
in terms of tensors on the basis of the variational principles.
His last interest was in the structural mechanisms of fracture of
materials. He studied the deceleration of a crack by the interface,
a model of a rhombus from inextensible fibers that describes
the dependence of the strength on the winding angles,
and the compressive fracture of composite tubes in the "Chinese lantern"
mode. He had an astonishing ability to see the fineness and simplicity
of such problems. The interest in such problems is increasing in connection
with teaching of the mechanics of composite materials. Rabotnov left us
excellent training problems on the fracture mechanics of composites.
Rabotnov was a genuine Russian intellectual and a genuine scientist
and did not care much about his career. Nevertheless, he was extremely
widely recognized in Russia and in the world. For several years
he was the Secretary Academician of the Department of Mechanics and
Control Processes in the USSR Academy of Sciences, worked in the Lenin
Prize Committee, was the editor-in-chief in a number of journals of the
Academy of Sciences, the chairman of the Scientific Council at the Mechanical
Engineering Research Institute and the chairman of the Science-and-Technology
Council on Structural Strength. His recognition abroad was even higher,
as is frequently the case for genuine scientists. He was elected,
together with T. Yokobori, the Vice-President and one of the directors of
the International Congress on Fracture. At the end of his life he received
the title of Honorary President for his fundamental results in the field
of damage mechanics.
For his great services in science and education he
was decorated with numerous
government awards - orders, medals, and the State Prize.
But the main acknowledgment of his talent of scientist and teacher
remains in hearts of his students and colleagues who worked with
him and pay high tribute to the creative heritage of Rabotnov,
an outstanding scientist and a remarkable person. As time elapses,
his results find more and more applications and it is becoming clear
that there are losses that cannot be recovered. |
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