Zdeněk Bažant

Zdeněk Pavel Bažant ( born December 10, 1937 in Prague ) is a Czech- American engineer scientist.

Bažant is the son of a Geotechnical Engineer. He won in 1955, the Mathematics Olympiad and then studied civil engineering at the Czech Technical University ( CVUT ) with the diploma in 1960. Three years later he became in 1963 a PhD from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, while he worked simultaneously for a public company as a bridge engineer. His dissertation dealt with the creep of concrete. In 1966 he acquired also a diploma in theoretical physics and 1967 he habilitated in 1967 at the CVUT. In 1966, he was to go abroad at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley; after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he remained entirely in the United States. In 1969 he became associate professor at Northwestern University and in 1973 Professor of Civil Engineering at the same university ( McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science).

He has published over 450 scientific papers. He is best known for working on mechanics of fracture and creep, scaling behavior and applications of probability theory in mechanics and nanomechanics. He also examined the collapse of the World Trade Center. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1996 and 2002 to the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

In 2009 he received the Timoshenko Medal and 2005 the Von Karman medal. He also received the Nadai and Warner medals of the ASME, Newmark, Biot and Croes Medals of ASCE and the William Prager Medal. Bažant is seven honorary doctorates ( Prague TU, TU Karlsruhe, Vienna University of Technology, Ohio State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, INSA Lyon, Milan Polytechnic ). Since 1971 he is registered as a Structural Engineer in Illinois.

Besides Czech and English, he speaks Russian, German and French.

Writings

• Scaling of Structural Strength, 2nd Edition, Elsevier 2005
• With M. Jirasek Inelastic analysis of structures, Wiley 2002
• With J. Planas Fracture and size effects in concrete and other materials quasibrittle, CRC Press 1998
• With Cedolin L. Stability of structures: elastic, inelastic, fracture and damage theories, Oxford University Press 1991, Dover Publications 2003, 3rd Edition World Scientific 2010
• Creep of concrete in the static analysis ( Czech), Prague 1966