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.
Among Drucker's most notable achievements there were: researches of stress-strain relations, finite plasticity, stability, fracture and flow on macroscale and microscale.
Drucker had also held some honorary lectureships, including the Marburg Lectureship of the American Society for Testing and Materials in 1966, the W. M. Murray Lectureship of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1967, and Washington University’s Raymond R. Tucker Memorial Lectureship in 1967.
Daniel has been awarded an honorary Doctorate of Engineering by Lehigh University in 1976 and an Honorary Doctorate of Science in Technology by the Israel Institute of Technology.
Daniel won the Max M. Frocht Award of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1967 and the Lamme Award of the American Society for Engineering Education the same year.
In 1978, he was presented with the Egleston Medal of the Engineering Alumni Association of Columbia University.
Daniel pioneered a method of classifying materials according to their degree of stability, now known as “Drucker’s postulate.”
One of his postulat
Using optical and electron microscopes, Drucker hypothesized—correctly, it turned out—that tiny precipitates, rather than grain size, determine the flow strength of steel and aluminum alloys.
Daniel also outlined some of the properties of various iron-alloy steels and of sintered carbides, carbides that have been formed by heating without melting.
Among his other achievements there can be named such as: Max M. Frocht Award from the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1967; Thomas Egleston Medal from the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1978; Gustave Trosenster Medal from the University of Liege, Belgium in 1979; Timoshenko Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which he won in 1983; National Medal of Science, which he got in 1988; ASME Medal in 1992.
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.
