Education
California Institute of Technology.
California Institute of Technology.
He earned his doctorate in 1934 at Caltech as one of the early students of Theodore von Kármán with a dissertation on the mechanics of thin-plate compression. He continued in this line of work, which had broad and deep applications in the structural aspects of aircraft and missiles. He played a key role under von Kármán in building GALCIT and the two collaborated on the structural design of the thin-shelled dome of Palomar Observatory.
He wrote two of the standard references on shell structures, Airplane structural analysis and design (1942, with L G Dunn) and Elasticity in Engineering (1952).
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1979, the year of his death.