Arthur T. Ippen

Arthur Thomas Ippen (born July 28, 1907 in London , † April 5, 1974 in Belmont (Massachusetts) ) was a German-American engineer for hydrodynamics. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Ippen was the son of German parents and studied civil engineering in Aachen with a diploma in 1931. He then worked for a year as an assistant in the geodesy department in Aachen and then went to the University of Iowa with one of the Institute of International Education to study abroad in the USA , to do a PhD. After his doctoral supervisor Floyd Nagler died, he went to Caltech , where he received his master's degree in 1935 and his doctorate in 1936 under Theodore von Karman and Robert T. Knapp . The dissertation was about currents in open channels at high speed with sediment transport and in it he followed an analogy of shock waves in currents with a free surface.

He was then an instructor and research engineer at Caltech for two years and taught from 1938 as an instructor and from 1939 as an assistant professor at Lehigh University (where he studied the influence of the viscosity of liquids on centrifugal pumps) before becoming an associate professor at MIT in 1945 went where he became a professor in 1948. There he expanded the hydrodynamics laboratory as director, for which a new building was inaugurated in 1950 (from 1970 after a major expansion, Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory for Water Resources and Hydrodynamics). He became a Ford Professor at MIT and eventually an Institute Professor (the top honor at MIT). In 1973 he officially retired.

He researched transient flows, turbulence, cavitation, sediment transport, layered flow, instrumentation in experiments on hydrodynamics and waves. He was a consultant to the US Army Corps of Engineers in various functions, for example for the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg (1966 to 1974), the Coastal Engineering Research Board (1964 to 1974) and the Tidal Hydraulics Committee (1950 to 1974). He advised UNESCO on the construction of a hydrological laboratory in Buenos Aires, for the port of New York on the expansion of La Guardia Airport and in the East River, on the construction of university facilities in Singapore on behalf of MIT, advised the Pakistani government and evaluated for the Inter-American Development Bank development projects in Brazil. He also advised numerous companies.

He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1967), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949) and President of the International Association for Hydraulic Research from 1959 to 1963 . Ippen received honorary doctorates from Toulouse, Karlsruhe and the University of Manchester. He was an honorary member of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, received the Prechtl Medal from the Vienna University of Technology and the Karl Emil Hilgard Prize from the ASCE , whose hydraulics department he headed in 1959/60. 1960/61 he was President of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers.

His first marriage (until her death in 1953) was to Elizabeth Wagenplatz, with whom he had a son ( Erich Peter Ippen ) and a daughter. In 1955 he married Ruth Calvert.

Web links

• Hunter Rouse, biography at the National Academy of Engineering, 1979
• Ippen Papers, MIT