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JoHN H. argyris
1913-2004
elected in 1986
“For outstanding pioneering and continuing contributions in computer
mechanics over a period of more than 30 years.”
By THoMas J. r. HUgHes, J. TiNsely odeN,
AND MANOLIS PAPADRAKAKIS
sUBMiTTed By THe Nae HoMe secreTary
J oHN H. argyris was a person with great vision, class,
and persuasion, who dramatically influenced computational
engineering and science and who will be long remembered
as one of the great pioneers of the discipline in its formative
years. He passed away quietly on april 2, 2004 after respiratory
complications. John rests in peace in sankt Jorgens cemetery
in the city of Varberg, 60 km south of goteborg, sweden, near
argyris’s summer house.
John was born on august 19, 1913, in the city of Volos, 300
km north of athens, greece, into a greek orthodox family. His
father was a direct descendant of a greek independence War
hero, while his mother came from an old Byzantine family of
politicians, poets, and scientists, which included the famous
mathematician Constantine Karatheodori, professor at the
University of Munich.
Volos, as it was during his childhood, remained very
much alive in his memory, especially the house he grew
up in. He vividly remembered, until the end, details of the
room where, at the age 2, he almost died from typhoid fever.
(Note: This article was first published in 2004 in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics
and Engineering, Vol. 193, pp. 3763–3766. With the permission of the authors and
cMaMe, we share it with you here.)
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26 MeMorial TriBUTes
in 1919 his family moved to athens, where he received his
initial education at a classical gymnasium in athens. after
studying civil engineering for four years at the National
Technical University of athens, he continued his studies at
the Technical University of Munich, where he obtained his
engineering diploma in 1936. Just after graduation he was
employed by a private consulting organization working on the
leading-edge technical design of highly complex structures.
one of these early engineering accomplishments was that of
designing a 320m high radio transmitter mast with a heavy
mass concentrated at the top.
With the outbreak of World War ii, John was in Berlin
continuing his studies at the Technical University. Just after
the german invasion of greece, John was arrested and led to a
concentration camp, on the accusation of transferring research
secrets to the allies. His savior turned out to be the eminent
German Admiral Kanaris, of Greek descent, who arranged
his escape by informing the guards that the prisoner would
be executed outside the camp. In 1944, Kanaris himself was
tragically executed as one of the leaders of the assassination
attempt against Hitler. following his escape from prison, John
managed to leave germany soon thereafter in a very dramatic
manner. He swam across the rhine river during a midnight
air raid, holding his passport in his teeth. He managed to reach
switzerland, where he completed his doctoral degree at eTH
Zurich in 1942 in aeronautics. in 1943 he moved to england and
worked as a technical officer at the Engineering Department of
the royal aeronautical society of london.
John could never derive any pleasure in ordinary day-to-
day work and was only attracted to problems that seemed
unsolvable. even when working in industry, his directors
soon realized that the best policy toward John argyris was to
entrust him with intractable problems. at the same time he
was fascinated by the properties of triangular and tetrahedral
components that appeared to him as ideal elements to build
up an engineering system. He could never sympathize with
cartesian analytical geometry that he found most inelegant.
during the war, he wrote three classic papers in Reports and
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JoHN H. argyris
Memoranda of the then aeronautical research council. These
were concerned with the diffusion of loads into stringer-
reinforced stressed skin structures of wings and fuselages.
He developed a theory using his intuition that combined
differential equations and finite difference calculus that was
immediately successful and later confirmed by experiments
and applied with great success to British fighter and bomber
aircraft during the war. However, the real breakthrough in his
way of thinking and approach to technical problems of solid
mechanics was achieved when the first electromechanical
computing devices emerged in 1944 in Britain at the National
Physical laboratory and in the United states at Harvard
University.
in those days aeronautical engineers were trying to build
the first combat jet aircraft whose speed required swept-back
wings. One such example was the flawed German fighter
Me262, proof of its designers’ failure to develop a reliable
method of analyzing the nonorthogonal geometry of wings.
in august of 1943 John spent three whole days and nights
in a bold attempt to solve that particular problem. His only
help was a rudimentary computing device capable of solving
a system of up to 64 unknowns. it took one sudden moment
of clarity, on the third evening of his brainstorming session
for him to realize that the answer could be the application of
triangular elements. Here his dislike of orthogonal cartesian
geometry found an ideal field. Astonishingly enough the
deviation from preceding experimental test results proved
less than 8 percent. This was the birth of the matrix force and
displacement methods, the finite element method, as later
named. immediately, all publications on this method were
declared secret. Within the triangular element philosophy,
John did not use cartesian direct and shear stresses and strains,
but a novel definition of stresses, expressed in terms of these
direct stresses and strains, measured parallel to the three sides
of each triangle. This new definition of stresses and strains led
to the formulation of the Natural approach, which possessed
great computational advantages and allowed a simple and
elegant generalization to large displacements.
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in 1949 John joined the imperial college of the University
of london as a senior lecturer and in 1955 became a full
professor and director of the sub-department of aeronautical
studies until 1975. after becoming an emeritus professor he
continued his collaboration with imperial college as a visiting
professor until 1980. in 1959 he accepted an offer from the
University of stuttgart and became director of the institute for
statics and dynamics of aerospace structures. He created the
aeronautical and astronautical campus of the University of
stuttgart, a focal point for applications of digital computers
and electronics. after becoming an emeritus professor at the
University of stuttgart, he continued to work until the age of
88 with the same vigor, writing books and scientific papers
with a compelling vitality and creative thinking.
in 1956 John addressed the problem of stress analysis of
aircraft fuselages with many cut-outs, openings, and severe
irregularities. computers then were not capable of enabling
a global application of the finite element method. John, again
following his intuition, realized that the problem could be
solved by a new physical device involving the application of
initial stresses and strains and an extension of matrix methods
to a higher level. This was presented at the international Union
of Theoretical and applied Mechanics (iUTaM) congress in
Brussels in 1956 and created a great upheaval, because the
whole derivation involved only 20 lines of physical argument
and four lines of advanced matrix algebra. Most experts in the
United states and europe said that the theory must be wrong
on the grounds of its simple derivation, and they did not even
accept the evidence of the computational results obtained by
John that proved the correctness of this derivation. somewhat
later, however, a Ph.d. thesis from sydney, australia, was sent
to John in which the candidate proved in 124 pages of close
mathematical argument that the formula of John argyris was
indeed correct. This approach was also extensively applied
to the design of the Boeing 747 as early as 1960. in the 1960s
and 1970s John had applied the finite element method with
great success in aerodynamics, optimization, combustion
problems, nonlinear mechanics and other fields of research
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JoHN H. argyris
and industrial interest, among them the suspension roof of
the Munich olympic stadium in the late 1960s. around that
period the National aeronautics and space administration
(Nasa) sought his knowledge on the thermal shielding of the
apollo spacecraft. He suggested covering the fuselage with
specially formulated substances that, upon reentry into the
atmosphere, would evaporate and cool its surface. in 1976 John
was concerned with the theory of chaos and introduced these
theories in studying the turbulence flow around the European
space vehicle Hermis.
It is difficult to summarize the impressive accomplishments
of John argyris. among his writings were over 10 books,
including three important textbooks: Introduction to the Finite
Element Method, Vols. i, ii and iii, (1986–88); Dynamics of
Structures (1991), An Explanation of Chaos (1994). The latter was
printed in english and german and in germany alone was
published three times in one year, a rare achievement for a
scientific publication of this kind. In addition to these writings,
he published over 500 extended scientific articles in major
international journals and lectured extensively both within
europe and abroad. His textbooks and extensive journal
publications are essential reading material for students,
practicing engineers, and researchers around the world and
have become benchmarks for later treatises on computational
mechanics.
one of his most important contributions in the engineering
community was the founding and editorship of the journal
Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering,
a publication that has provided much of the lifeblood
of computational methods in applied mechanics and
engineering for more than three decades. John argyris took
great interest and pride in this venture and insisted on running
the journal meticulously and diligently, thus succeeding
in making it one of the leading journals in computational
mechanics available today.
John received many honors including 18 doctorate degrees,
“Honoris Causa,” three honorary professorships and six
academy memberships from universities and academies all
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30 MeMorial TriBUTes
over the world, and more than 25 other awards and distinctions,
among them the gauss–Newton award from the international
association for computational Mechanics (iacM), the von
Karman Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers
(asce), the Timoshenko Medal from asMe, the laskowitz
gold Medal from the academy of science of New york for
“the invention of the Finite Element Method,” the Prince
Philip gold Medal of the royal academy of engineering, the
grand cross of Merit of the federal republic of germany,
and the einstein award from the einstein foundation for his
“momentous work on the Finite Element Method and Chaos
Theory.” He was also a fellow of the royal society of london,
honorary member of the executive council of iacM, and
honorary president of gacM.
John was blessed with many talents, making him a true
modern renaissance man; he was a scholar, a thinker, a
teacher, a visionary, an orator, an elegant writer, a linguist.
deeply cultivated, a man with rare principles and a passionate
patriot, he was also unique in blending his Mediterranean
temperament with Western european rationalism.
In the paper that coined the name “Finite Element Method,”
published in 1960, the world-renowned author ray clough
refers to the finite element method as “the Argyris Method.”
Von Karman’s prophetic statement that Argyris’s invention
of the finite element method entailed one of the greatest
discoveries in engineering mechanics and revolutionized our
thinking processes more than 50 years ago was proven to be
absolutely true. Indeed, the finite element method, based on
John argyris’s fundamental and far-reaching contribution,
has truly revolutionized today’s engineering and scientific
environments. He had the vision and intellectual capacity
to develop the basic steps of the finite element method and
to make numerous contributions in the development of the
method. His early work “Energy Theorems of Structural
analysis,” published in 1954, is considered to be the most
important series of papers ever published in the field of
structural mechanics.
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JoHN H. argyris
during the early years at imperial college he met his
wife inga-lisa, who provided him with unshakable support
throughout all the difficult moments of his life. John was also
fortunate to see his son Holger follow a successful career in
engineering and bring into the world, with his wife carina,
two adorable grandchildren who brightened his final years.
John, in accordance with Herakleitos’s aphorism of
“everything flows,” has joined the pantheon of those
enlightening personalities who, with their revolutionary ideas
and contributions, changed the scientific world in the 20th
century. His geometrical spirit, the elegance of his writings,
his deep appreciation and understanding of classical ideas, his
creativity, and his epochal vision of the future initiated and
defined the modern era of engineering analysis and set us
all on life’s path of discovery. our computational mechanics
community has lost the most eminent member and for many
of us a devoted friend. He will be deeply missed, but his legacy
will empower generations.
