Klaus Knothe

Klaus Knothe (born January 17, 1937 in Breslau ) is a German civil engineer. Until his retirement in 2002, he was a university professor at the Technical University of Berlin in the field of construction calculation.

Education

Klaus Knothe fled with his mother from the city of Wroclaw , which was declared a fortress by the National Socialists, in early 1945 to Weißdorf in Upper Franconia , which became his second home. attended secondary school in Münchberg and graduated from high school there in 1956. He then studied civil engineering at the Technical Universities of Munich and Darmstadt until 1963 and then, on the advice of Curt Schmieden (1905–1991), mathematics. Because of his pre-exam he was accepted into the German National Academic Foundation . At the TH Darmstadt he was particularly influenced by the mathematician Curt Schmieden, the mechanic Karl Marguerre (1905–1979) and the structural engineer and steelworker Kurt Klöppel (1901–1985). Klaus Knothe completed his studies in 1963 as a graduate engineer, specializing in mathematics - as did Ernst Giencke (1925–2007) and Erwin Stein (1931) before. In the same year he published the abridged version of his thesis, supervised by Klöppel, in the journal Stahlbau . Despite an offer from Klöppel, he decided to work as an assistant for mechanics and construction calculation at Professor Ernst Giencke, who left the TH Darmstadt in 1963 to take up a professorship at the TU Berlin.

Research and Teaching

In his doctorate , which he completed in 1967 , Knothe dealt with a topic from the field of the method of finite elements, an area that later developed into the heart of Computational Mechanics (computer-aided calculation methods) and was then to conquer other areas of application that are dominated by field problems. His dissertation was based on the ideas of Hermann Schaefer (1907–1969) from the TH Braunschweig , who had dealt with tension functions for plates. In his habilitation in 1969, Knothe analyzed the structural dynamics of framework structures. He then worked as a professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, later in the Department of Transportation and Applied Mechanics at the TU Berlin. The main focus in the teaching was on the areas of construction calculation, finite element method (FEM), surface structures, vibration calculation of elastic continuums and rail vehicle dynamics, the focus in research on the areas of FEM, rail vehicle dynamics, contact mechanics and track dynamics. The collaboration with Robert Gasch was formative for Klaus Knothe . Both published a two-volume work on structural dynamics, which, with Robert Liebich as another author, was combined in a second, newly edited edition and was published in June 2012. Of his books, the engineers are probably best known for the introduction to the method of finite elements, first published in 1991 by Heribert Wessels, which appeared in the fifth, expanded edition in 2017 and is the leading textbook in this field in German-speaking countries.

In establishing and anchoring modern rail technology research in the Federal Republic of Germany, Knothe and his staff played a key role. In 2001 he published his Gleisdynamik and in 2003 with Sebastian Stichel the standard work for rail vehicle dynamics, an English version of which was published in 2017. In the list of publications by Knothes, which consists of more than 260 titles, works on problems related to railway technology predominate.

Even before his retirement in April 2002, Knothe dealt with questions relating to the history of science and technology. The impetus in the context of his dissertation was the study of general principles of variation. The variation principles of the extremum of the potential energy and of the extremum of the deformation energy are the basis for the deformation method and the force measurement method. The generalization of both principles is usually attributed to Eric Reissner (1913–1996). The fact that this generalized principle of variation was formulated by Ernst Hellinger (1883–1950) and Georg Prange (1885–1941) has largely been forgotten, mainly because Prange's work never appeared and was practically no longer accessible. In 1999 Knothe published the work of Prange, the first publication of this groundbreaking work for the history of the calculus of variations, of which only two copies of a typewritten version existed at that time. These scientific-historical works by Knothes flowed into the monograph on Karl-Eugen Kurrer's history of structural engineering .

At the suggestion of Professor Ladislav Frýba ( TH Prague ), Knothe dealt with the life and work of Emil Winkler (1835–1888), whom Knothe regarded as his "scientific great-grandfather". He presented a comprehensive bibliography and the publication of the correspondence that still exists today with the mathematician Wilhelm Fiedler (1832–1912).

Most recently, Knothe turned to the history of his second home. So he works on historical processes in the Upper Franconian area, between Bayreuth , Kulmbach and Hof . Literature from the Baroque period, which can almost be regarded as trivial literature, comes into its own here as well as texts from the field of folk medicine and superstition. The engineering sciences do not take a back seat, but appear again and again in the form of reviews.

On the occasion of the completion of his 75th year of life, an appreciation of his scientific work was published in the journal “Stahlbau”.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Knothe, K .: Comparative representation of the approximate calculation for determining the load-bearing capacity of a rigid steel frame. Stahlbau 32 (1963), no. 11, pp. 330-336 and 33 (1964), no. 5, p. 160
2. ↑ Knothe, K .: Plate calculation according to the force quantity method. Stahlbau 36 (1967), no. 7, pp. 202-214 and H. 8, pp. 245-254
3. ↑ Knothe, K .: Comparative presentation of different methods for calculating the natural vibrations of framework structures. Progress reports VDI-Z., Series 11, no.9 Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag 1971
4. ^ Gasch, R., Knothe, K .: Structural Dynamics. Volume 1. Discrete Systems. Berlin etc .: Springer 1987
5. ^ Gasch, R., Knothe, K .: Structural Dynamics. Volume 2. Continua and their discretization. Berlin etc .: Springer 1989
6. ↑ Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Liebich. TU Berlin, accessed on May 30, 2018 . 
7. ^ Gasch, R., Knothe, K., Liebich, R .: Structure dynamics. Discrete Systems and Continua. 2., rework. Berlin etc .: Springer 2012
8. ↑ Knothe, K., Wessels, H .: Finite Elements - An Introduction for Engineers. 5th, exp. Edition Berlin etc .: Springer 2017
9. ↑ Knothe, K .: Track dynamics. Berlin: Ernst & Son 2001
10. ↑ Sebastian Stichel. KTH , accessed on May 30, 2018 . 
11. ↑ Knothe, K., Stichel, S .: Rail Vehicle Dynamics. Berlin etc .: Springer 2003
12. ^ Knothe, K., Stichel, S .: Rail Vehicle Dynamics. Berlin etc .: Springer 2017
13. ↑ Knothe, K. (Ed.): The extremum of form change work. Habilitation thesis. Technical University of Hanover 1916. Georg Prange. ALGORISM. Studies on the history of mathematics and natural sciences, issue 31. Munich: Institute for the history of natural sciences 1999
14. ^ Kurrer, K.-E .: History of structural engineering. In search of balance. Berlin: Ernst & Son 2016
15. ↑ Ladislav Fryba. Prabook, accessed May 30, 2018 . 
16. ^ Knothe, K .: Fiedlerbriefe and Bibliography Emil Winkler. ALGORISM. Studies on the history of mathematics and the natural sciences, issue 48. Munich: Institute for the history of natural sciences. Augsburg: Dr. Erwin Rauner Verlag 2004
17. ^ Knothe, K .: Structural engineering and aircraft construction - stages in the life of Alfred Teichmann. In: Stahlbau 74 (2005), no. 5, pp. 373–378.
18. ↑ Knothe, K .: Force measurement method and deformation method in the light of Georg Prange's habilitation thesis. In: Stahlbau 84 (2015), no. 5, pp. 341–346
19. ^ Kurrer, K.-E .: Klaus Knothe 75 years. In: Stahlbau 81 (2012), no. 2, pp. 163–164