Raymond D. Mindlin

Raymond David Mindlin ( born September 17, 1906 in New York City; † 22 November 1987 in Hanover (New Hampshire) ) was an American engineer scientist for mechanics.

Mindlin studied from 1924 at Columbia University, where in 1931 he took his bachelor's degree in 1932 and his Master of Civil Engineering ( CE). 1933 to 1935 he attended several summer courses in theoretical mechanics at Stephen Timoshenko at the University of Michigan. In 1936 he received his doctorate at Columbia University. He subsequently assistant, from 1938 Instructor, Assistant Professor in 1940, Associate Professor in 1945 and Professor in 1947 (from 1967 as James Kip Finch Professor ). In 1975, he went into retirement.

During the Second World War, he made ​​important contributions to the development of proximity fuses (proximity fuse ) at Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Springs (Maryland), for which he was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit after the war.

He is known among other things for Mindlin 's problem in elasticity theory, the question of the pressure distribution in the elastic half-space due to a point load at the surface. He gave the solution in his dissertation in 1936, where he generalized older treatments of the theme point load on an elastic half-space by Kelvin and Boussinesq. The problem has applications in geotechnical engineering, where he also dealt with the problem of the stress distribution around the tunnel. He treated later among other wave propagation and vibrations in isotropic and anisotropic elastic plates, wave propagation in cylinders theory of piezoelectric resonators, and crystal lattices, photoelasticity, granular media, and theory of friction.

Mindlin was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1973 ), the National Academy of Engineering ( 1966), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958), the Acoustical Society of America (1963 ), the American Society of Civil Engineers ( 1962) whose honor he became a member in 1969. In 1946, he received the Presidential Medal for Merit, 1979, the National Medal of Science, 1961, the von Karman Medal from the ASCE and the 1964 Timoshenko Medal. In 1975 he was made an honorary Doctor of Northwestern University.

His doctoral counts Daniel printer.

In his honor, the Raymond D. Mindlin Medal of ASCE is named.