William R. Sears

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William Rees Sears (born March 1, 1913 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † October 12, 2002 in Tucson , Arizona ) was an American aircraft engineer and expert in aerodynamics .

Life

Sears studied at the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in 1934 and with Theodore von Kármán at Caltech (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, GALCIT), where he received his doctorate in 1938. He also ran a pilot training program at Caltech (where he obtained his pilot's license himself) and was married to Karman's secretary, Mabel Rhodes, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In 1940 he became an assistant professor at Caltech and in 1941 moved to Northrop Aircraft , for which he had previously worked at the university, as engineer and head of aerodynamics and test flight program . In 1946 he went to Cornell University as the founder of the School of Aircraft Technology. He remained its director until 1963 and was then director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell. In 1974 he moved to the University of Arizona , where he retired in 1978. There, like at Cornell, he developed wind tunnels, among other things .

At Northrop he developed the experimental aircraft Northrop N-1M , a flying wing and the Northrop P-61 ( Black Widow ) in the 1940s . He dealt with in particular with wing theory, in particular his work started in his dissertation on oscillations of wings in an ideal wind flow (Karman-Sears theory), and compressible flow around bodies of revolution.

In 1992 he received the hydrodynamics award of the American Physical Society and he received the Ludwig Prandtl Ring in 1974 and he received the Guggenheim Medal. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958) and the National Academy of Engineering . He was an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Arizona.

His autobiography was published in 1994 ( Stories from a 20th Century Life , Parabolic Press). He was an amateur musician who earned part of his college career as a drummer in dance and jazz bands, played the timpani in the Pasadena Symphony and Pops Orchestra for several years, and later at the university as a recorder in groups for medieval music.

Fonts

  • General theory of high speed aerodynamics , Princeton University Press 1954
  • Introduction to theoretical aerodynamics and hydrodynamics , American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, Virginia 2011
  • The airplane and its components , Wiley, Chapman and Hall 1942
  • Small perturbation theory , Princeton University Press 1960
  • Collected Papers published by Cornell University Press 1973, 1997

literature

  • KY Fung (Editor) Symposium on Aeroacoustics and Aerodynamics (Tucson 1993), World Scientific 1994 (Symposium on his 80th birthday)
  • Nicholas Rott William Rees Sears , Biographical Memoirs National Academy, Volume 86, 2005

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karman, Sears Airfoil theory for non-uniform motion , J. Aeronaut. Science, 5, 1938, 379-390
personal data
SURNAME Sears, William R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sears, William Rees (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American aircraft engineer
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Minneapolis , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 2002
Place of death Tucson , Arizona