John W. Hutchinson facts for kids

John W. Hutchinson, born on April 10, 1939, is a famous American engineer and professor. He is known for his work in solid mechanics, which is the study of how solid objects and materials behave when forces are applied to them. He has been a professor at Harvard University for many years.

In 1983, John Hutchinson was chosen to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering. This was because he made important discoveries about how structures bend or break, and how engineering materials behave and crack.

Early Life and School

John Hutchinson was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1939. He was the oldest child of John W. Hutchinson and Evelyn Eastburn Hutchinson. When he was about a month old, his family moved to Bridgeton, New Jersey. His father became a minister there.

John grew up in Bridgeton and went to the local high school. He then went to Lehigh University for college from 1956 to 1960. He decided to study Engineering Mechanics, a new subject at the time. During these years, space exploration, especially by the Soviet Union, made many young engineers excited about their field. A summer job at Boeing in 1959 also motivated him.

After college, Hutchinson decided to continue his studies at Harvard University. He worked on his Ph.D. research with Bernard Budiansky. Budiansky was an expert in solid mechanics and structures who had worked at NACA (a research group that later became NASA). Hutchinson's Ph.D. project was about how metals behave when they are stretched or bent. He studied how tiny parts of the metal, called grains, affect the whole material.

Starting His Career

After finishing his Ph.D. in 1963, Hutchinson spent six months in Denmark at the Technical University of Denmark. While he was there, Harvard invited him to come back and become a professor. He accepted and has been connected with Harvard ever since. He worked his way up through the ranks and served on the faculty for fifty years. Today, he is a Research Professor, which means he is still involved in research even though he is retired from full-time teaching. He also holds positions at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

When Hutchinson started teaching at Harvard in 1964, he learned a lot from older, experienced professors. These included Bernard Budiansky, George Carrier (who studied fluids and math), Bruce Chalmers (who studied metals), and Lyell Sanders (who studied solids). The 1960s were a time when engineering and science grew a lot in American universities. Harvard was an exciting place for a young professor because it was an old university with a strong history of research.

When he was first hired, the Dean told him that he probably wouldn't get a permanent job at Harvard. But the Dean was wrong! A permanent position opened up, and in 1969, John Hutchinson became the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics. For a while, he was the youngest professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Important Research Areas

After his Ph.D., Hutchinson worked with Budiansky on how thin structures, like those used in airplanes, can bend or collapse under pressure. This is called "buckling." Real structures always have tiny flaws, and these flaws can make them buckle much more easily than perfect ones. Their work helped engineers understand and predict how these flaws affect structures. They used the ideas of Warner Koiter, a Dutch scientist whose work was not widely known at the time. Hutchinson's work with Koiter was the start of many successful collaborations with scientists from other countries.

How Materials Break

In the 1960s, scientists studying mechanics and materials started working together more closely. Solid mechanics began to focus on problems related to materials. Hutchinson became very interested in how materials behave at a tiny level.

From the late 1960s to the 1980s, Hutchinson studied how materials break, especially tough metal alloys. He helped develop "nonlinear fracture mechanics." This new method was needed because older methods didn't work when materials stretched or bent a lot before cracking. In 1968, he published a paper describing the forces and stretching near the tip of a crack in materials that were bending. Another scientist, James Rice, published a similar study at the same time. These ideas became known as the HRR crack tip fields. They are a key part of understanding how materials break. James Rice later joined Harvard in 1981 and became Hutchinson's close colleague.

Working with Tony Evans

In the late 1970s, Hutchinson started working with A.G. (Tony) Evans, a materials scientist. This partnership lasted over thirty years until Evans passed away in 2009. Evans was very good at finding important technology problems and bringing together teams of experts to solve them. Hutchinson's skills in math and modeling combined well with Evans' broad knowledge of materials.

Together, they contributed to many areas of engineering science. This included making ceramics stronger, developing materials for high-temperature uses, studying how thin layers of material behave, and understanding how different materials stick together or peel apart. They also studied coatings used in aircraft engines to protect them from heat. They wrote 74 papers together.

Later Research

In the 1990s and beyond, Hutchinson continued to research many different problems. He kept working on older topics while also exploring new ones. This meant he built up a lot of knowledge and skills in many areas.

New areas of his research included:

• Developing a full understanding of how layered materials break and peel apart. This is important for things like thin films, coatings, and layers used in electronics and optics.
• Extending the classic theory of how metals bend to very small scales. At these tiny sizes, materials behave differently.
• More recently, he has focused on how soft materials like rubber and gels deform. These materials are becoming very important, especially for medical uses.

Achievements and Recognition

John Hutchinson has been very fortunate in his career. He has worked in an environment that strongly supports research, with excellent colleagues and students. He also became an engineer at a time when the United States was investing a lot in engineering and science.

He has guided 36 students through their Ph.D. studies. He has published almost 350 technical papers. He has worked with nearly 200 different co-authors. About 65% of these co-authors were from America, and 35% were from other countries. About 25% of his co-authors were Harvard students, post-doctoral researchers, or faculty members.

Hutchinson has received many awards. These include the Timoshenko Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2002. In 2015, the science society Sigma Xi gave him the Ferst Award for his work in mentoring students. Many of his former students attended the ceremony.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. He joined the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1983 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1990. In 2013, he was chosen as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. He has also received honorary degrees from several universities around the world.

In 2012, Hutchinson received the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics. This award recognized his "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering."