Donald Burmister

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Donald Martin Burmister ( 1895 - May 19, 1981 in Battle Creek (Michigan) ) was an American civil engineer and geotechnician.

He studied at Columbia University and became an instructor there in 1929. At the suggestion of Dean James Kip Finch, he dealt with soil mechanics, a discipline that was still young at the time, and in 1933 he opened one of the first soil mechanics laboratories in the USA. In 1963 he retired.

He was a geotechnical consultant on over 400 projects, including the Brookhaven National Laboratory , the Throgs Neck, Tappan Zee and Verazano Narrows bridges, the first New York World's Fair in 1939 in Flushing Meadows (with a difficult building site on a former ash depot) and the renovation of the White House in Washington in 1950, which was then given a steel skeleton. Back then, Burmister was able to clear the foundation in the gravel at a depth of 22 feet (instead of in the rock at 78 feet).

He developed test procedures in soil mechanics and a soil classification system that, in contrast to the usual standard systems, also includes mineralogical and geological information as well as color and texture. As early as the 1950s, he was using computers in a research project on multi-layered road surfaces. He solved the elastic case of the stress distribution of a point load in the case of stratified soils (with clear deviations from the standard case without stratification according to Joseph Boussinesq ).

He was a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers . In 1979 he received the Egleston Medal from Columbia University.

Fonts

  • Notes on Soil Mechanics, Columbia University 1934
  • The Theory of Stresses and Displacements in Layered Systems and Application to the Design of Airport Runways, Proceedings, Highway Research Board 1943
  • The General Theory of Stresses and Displacements in Layered Soil Systems, Journal of Applied Physics, Volume 16, 1945

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Klara, The Hidden White House. Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence, Thomas Dunne Books, 2013, p. 138
personal data
SURNAME Burmister, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burmister, Donald Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American civil engineer
DATE OF BIRTH 1895
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1981
Place of death Battle Creek, Michigan