William R. Sears

William Rees Sears ( born March 1, 1913 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, † October 12, 2002 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American aeronautical engineer and expert in aerodynamics.

Life

Sears studied at the University of Minnesota with a bachelor 's degree in 1934 and at Theodore von Karman at Caltech ( Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, GALCIT ), where he received his doctorate in 1938. At Caltech, he also launched a program for pilot training (he himself received his pilot's license ) and married by Karman secretary Mabel Rhodes, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In 1940 he was Assistant Professor at Caltech and joined in 1941 as an engineer and head of aerodynamics and flight test program to Northrop Aircraft, for whom he had worked previously at the University. In 1946, he went to Cornell University as the founder of the School of Aviation Technology. He remained until 1963 its director and then was director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell. In 1974 he moved to the University of Arizona, where he retired in 1978. There he developed as in Cornell including wind tunnel.

At Northrop, he developed in the 1940s, the experimental aircraft Northrop N- 1M, a flying wing and the Northrop P-61 (Black Widow). He dealt with a particular wing theory, especially his work begun in his dissertation on oscillations of airfoils in an ideal wind power ( Karman -Sears theory ), and compressible flow around rotating bodies.

In 1992 he received the hydrodynamics Prize of the American Physical Society and in 1974 he received the Ludwig Prandtl Ring and he received the Guggenheim Medal. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He was Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and an honorary doctorate from the University of Arizona.

In 1994 he published his autobiography ( Stories from a 20th century life, Parabolic Press). He was an amateur musician who partly earned his college as a drummer in dance and jazz bands, played several years timpani in Pasadena Symphony and Pops Orchestra and later at the University of Recorder in groups for medieval music.

Writings

• General theory of high speed aerodynamics, Princeton University Press 1954
• Introduction to theoretical aerodynamics and hydrodynamics, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, Virginia, 2011
• The airplane and its components, Wiley, Chapman and Hall, 1942
• Small perturbation theory, Princeton University Press, 1960
• Collected Papers published by Cornell University Press 1973, 1997