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Zienkiewicz recognised with Prince Philip Medal

A Royal Academy of Engineering product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 29, 2006

The Royal Academy of Engineering is to confer its solid gold Prince Philip Medal to Professor Olek Zienkiewicz CBE FREng FRS, widely regarded as the "father of the finite element method".

The Royal Academy of Engineering is to confer its solid gold Prince Philip Medal to Professor Olek Zienkiewicz CBE FREng FRS, widely regarded as the "father of the finite element method", for outstanding contributions spanning the wide field of mechanics and engineering.

The Prince Philip Medal, instigated in 1989, is awarded periodically to an engineer of any nationality "who has made an exceptional contribution to engineering as a whole through practice, management or education".

Olek Zienkiewicz is Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Institute for Numerical Methods in Engineering at the University of Wales, Swansea.

He holds the UNESCO Chair of Numerical Methods in Engineering at the Technical University of Catalunya in Barcelona and is a past holder of the Joe C Walter Chair of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.

Born in Surrey in 1921, he attended primary and secondary schools in Poland and obtained his BSc, PhD and DSc at Imperial College.

Since his first paper in 1947 dealing with numerical approximation to the stress analysis of dams, he has published nearly 600 papers and written or edited more than 25 books.

He was one of the early pioneers of the finite element method and was the first to realise its potential for the solution to problems outside the area of solid mechanics.

His own contribution to the method's development made it the widely applicable tool of computational mechanics and engineering that it is today.

His books on the finite element method were the first to present the subject and to this day remain the standard reference texts.

In his research career, he has personally supervised over 70 PhD students, many of whom today hold leading positions in academia and industry.

He also founded the first journal dealing with computational mechanics in 1968 (International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering) which is still the major journal for the field of numerical computations.

He has served as a member of Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers and was the Chairman of the Analysis and Design Committee of the International Congress for Large Dams.

Professor Zienkiewicz has received honorary degrees from Ireland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, China, Poland, Scotland, Wales, France, England, Italy, Portugal, Hong Kong, Hungary and the United States.

He has been the recipient of many awards, including the title of Commander of the British Empire, the prestigious Royal Medal of the Royal Society from HM Queen Elizabeth II, the Carl Friedrich Gauss Medal of the West German Academy of Science, the Nathan Newmark Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Newton-Gauss Medal of the International Association for Computational Mechanics, the Gold Medal of the Institution for Mathematics and its Applications, a Gold Medal from the Institution of Structural Engineers and the Timoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

He was elected to the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1979 and is a Foreign Member of the United States National Academy of Engineering, the Polish Academy of Science, the Italian National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Zienkiewicz will receive the Prince Philip Medal from HRH Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace on 16th June 2006.