Ferdinand Freudenstein

Ferdinand Freudenstein (born May 12, 1926 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 30, 2006 ) was a German-American mechanical engineer.

Life

Because of the persecution as a Jew by the National Socialists, Freudenstein fled with his parents and siblings via the Netherlands to England (1937). His father and brother were brought to Australia by the British as hostile foreigners; he himself came to the USA in 1942 with his mother and two sisters via Trinidad. Freudenstein began studying at New York University , then enlisted in the US Army and continued studying mechanical engineering after the war with a GI Bill. Originally he wanted to study mathematics, but his father wanted him to become a businessman like him and mechanical engineering was a compromise in his choice of studies.

In 1948 he received his masters degree from Harvard University . He worked for the American Optical Company in Buffalo, New York for two years before continuing his studies at Columbia University , where he did his PhD with H. Dean Baker. At that time there were no specialists in the kinematics of machines at the university (Baker himself was a specialist in combustion processes), and Freudenstein is considered to be the founder of modern kinematics in the USA. During his studies he also worked as an engineer for companies in the summer, so in 1954 he was a member of Bell Laboratories , which he continued in his later career (in particular for IBM, General Motors, Foster Wheeler, Gulf and Western, Singer Company, Bell Labs and Designatroncis).

1957 he became associate professor at Columbia University, 1958 chairman of the mechanical engineering department and 1959 he received a full professor for mechanical engineering. From 1985 he was Higgins Professor .

He had numerous students at Columbia University. In analytical kinematics, the Freudenstein equation is named after him, which Freudenstein introduced in his dissertation in 1954. This is a scalar equation that includes the angles and lengths of a flat chain of four hinged rods and is used in the analysis and design of the motion curves of the hinge mechanism.

His work was mathematically oriented, for example in the algebraic geometry of coupling curves of joint mechanisms, but he also applied topology, graph theory, Polya's theory of the counting of tree structures, Boolean algebra, quaternions, line geometry, numerical and other mathematical methods. He had scientific contacts with the leading Soviet scientist for transmission mechanisms Iwan Iwanowitsch Artobolewski and he invited the Dutch mathematician Oene Bottema and the British Eric Primerose to Columbia University.

He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering , was an honorary fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1961/62 and 1967/68. In 1992 he received the Egleston Medal from Columbia University. He retired in 1996 when signs of Alzheimer's were already evident. The illness also prevented the planned monograph on machine kinematics.

In 1959 he married Leah Schwartzschild, who died in 1970 and with whom he had a son and a daughter. He lived in Riverdale, Bronx. In 1980 he married the teacher Lydia Gersten.

He held several patents.

Fonts (selection)

• An analytical approach to the design of four-link mechanisms, ASME Trans., Volume 76, 1954, pp. 483-492
• with GN Sandor: Kinematics of Mechanisms, in: H. Rothbart (Ed.), Machine design and mechanical systems handbook, McGraw Hill 1964, pp. 1-58
• with E. Primrose, B. Roth: Six-bar motion, 3 parts, Arch. Rat. Mech. Anal., Vol. 24, 1967, pp. 22-77
• Kinematics- past, present and future, J. Mech. Mach. Theory, Vol. 8, 1973, pp. 151-160
• Kinematic structure: a unifying concept, Proc. Workshop New Directions in Kinematic Research, Stanford University 1977, pp. 33-36

literature

• Bernard Roth: Ferdinand Freudenstein (1926–2006), in: Marco Ceccarelli (Ed.), Distinguished Figures in Mechanism and Machine Science , Volume 1, Springer 2007, pp. 151–182
• Arthur G. Erdman (Ed.): Modern Kinematics. Developments in the Last Forty Years, Wiley 1993 (Festschrift for Freudenstein's 65th birthday)

Web links

• Biography of Bernard Roth , Indian Academy of Sciences (pdf)
• Academic Tree by Freudenstein