Background
Daniel Drucker was born on June 3, 1918 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Moses Abraham, a civil engineer, and Mabelle (Breschel) Drucker.
Daniel Drucker was born on June 3, 1918 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Moses Abraham, a civil engineer, and Mabelle (Breschel) Drucker.
From an early age, Drucker realized his ambition was to be a design engineer. He was educated at New York’s Columbia University, and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1937. He remained at the University to pursue further studies in engineering, and received his Master of Civil Engineering degree in 1938. He then went on for doctoral studies, and was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy in 1940.
Daniel had a lot of honorary degrees in several universities: Honorary Doctor of Engineering, Lehigh University, 1976; Honorary Doctor of Science in Technology, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, 1983; Honorary Doctor of Science, Brown University, 1984; Honorary Doctor of Science, Northwestern University, 1985; Honorary Doctor of Science, University Illinois, 1992.
At the begining of his career Drucker was offered a position of an instructor in Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for three years from 1940. He then served as a supervisor of mechanics of solids at the Armour Research Foundation from 1943 till 1945. Drucker spent a short time in the U.S. Army Air Corps, then returned to academic life to become an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology during the term 1946-1947.
In the same year, Drucker transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island, where he spent the next twenty-one years; he became a full professor in 1950. Three years later, he became a chair of the department of Engineering, and he was a chair of the university’s Physical Sciences Council between 1961 and 1963.
Drucker moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Dean of the College of Engineering in 1968. He remained in that position until 1984, when he accepted a post as Graduate Research Professor of Aerospace at the University of Florida in Gainesville. That same year, 1984, he retired the technical editorship of the Journal of Applied Mechanics of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which he had held since 1956.
Drucker’s career has been saluted many times. He served as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1960 to 1961.
Drucker was the first vice president and chair of the Engineering College Council of the American Society for Engineering Education, and was a member of the National Science Board beginning in 1988.
Drucker was a member of many learned societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to which he was elected in 1955; the National Academy of Engineering, of which he became a member in 1967; and the American Society of Mechanics.
Also he was a member of: International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, American Society for Engineering Education.
Drucker married Ann Bodin on August 19, 1939. The couple has two children, R. David Drucker and Mady Upham.