John Argyris

John Hadji Argyris ( Greek Ιωάννης Αργύρης ; * August 19, 1913 in Volos , Greece ; † April 2, 2004 in Stuttgart ) was co-founder of the Finite Element Method (FEM) and most recently professor at the University of Stuttgart and head of the institute for Statics and dynamics of aerospace structures.

resume

John Argyris studied civil engineering in Athens and Munich and received his diploma in 1936. At first he was employed by the Gollnow company in Stettin , where he was involved in the construction of tall radio masts, among other things. His next stops were Berlin and Zurich . He then went to the research department of the Royal Aeronautical Society in England in 1943 . From 1949 he was a lecturer in aerospace structures at Imperial College, University of London, where he got a newly established chair in 1955. In 1959, Argyris went to the Technical University of Stuttgart (now Stuttgart University) as a professor, where he founded the Institute for Statics and Dynamics of Aerospace Structures.

Scientific work

Alongside Ray W. Clough and Olgierd C. Zienkiewicz and after the early mathematical preparatory work by Richard Courant, Argyris was significantly involved in the development of the finite element method in the 1950s, helped to establish it as a calculation method and did valuable pioneering work on it Field, but also in the field of aerospace engineering.

With the then new FE method, strength calculations of aircraft wings and fuselages were first carried out. The problems of elasticity theory were no longer dealt with only with differential equations , but with numerical methods . The prerequisite for solving the systems of equations was the use of computers .

Under his leadership, the ASKA (Automatic System for Kinematic Analysis) program system was created at the Institute for Statics and Dynamics of Aerospace Structures (ISD) at the University of Stuttgart in the years 1965–1985 , which, along with NASTRAN, was one of the first universally applicable programs for calculations the finite element method.

Honors

In 1985 he received the Great Cross of Merit and in 1990 the Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany.

John Argyris has received numerous awards for his scientific work, including the Medal of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg , the Royal Medal of the British Queen and the Royal Society in London (1995) and the Prince Philip Gold Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the highest award of engineering in the UK (1997). Argyris is the recipient of the Tymoshenko Medal in 1981.

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer History of Structural Analysis. In search of balance , Ernst & Sohn 2016, p. 860ff, p. 945f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03134-6

Fonts

• The exploration of chaos, Vieweg 1995, Springer Verlag 2010
• Dynamics of Structures, North Holland 1991
• with Lazarus Tenek: Finite element analysis for composite structures, Kluwer 1998
• with S. Kelsey: Modern fuselage analysis and the elastic aircraft, basic theory, London: Butterworth 1963
• with S. Kelsey: Energy theorems and structural analysis; a generalized discourse with applications on energy principles of structural analysis including the effects of temperature and nonlinear stress-strain relations, London, Butterworth 1960
  • Two articles of the same name appeared in Aircraft Engineering, Volume 26, 1954, pp. 347-387, 410-422, Volume 27, 1955, pp. 42-58, 80-94, 125-134, 145-158
• The matrix theory in statics, Ingenieurarchiv, Volume 25, 1957, 174–192
• Recent advances in matrix methods of structural analysis, Pergamon Press 1964
• The computer shapes the theory, Journal of the Aeronautical Society, Volume 65, 1965, pp. XXXII
• with H.-P. Mlejnek: The Finite Element Method, 2 volumes, Vieweg 1986, 1987

Trivia

Argyris was the nephew of the famous mathematician Constantin Carathéodory .

Web links

• Literature by and about John Argyris in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on a list of Greek personalities
• Obituary from the University of Stuttgart