AWARDEE OF PHYSICS PRIZE

HU HAICHANG

Abstract

Prof.Hu Haichang is a specialist in engineering mechanics.He was born in Hangzhou,Zhejiang Province in April,1928.He graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering of Zhejiang University in 1950.He served successively as director of the Laboratory of Solid Mechanics of Institute of Mechanics of Chinese Academy of Sciences,director and honorary director of the Science and Technology Committee of Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering of Chinese Academy of Space Technology,president of Chinese Society of Vibration Engineering,vicepresident of Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics,and chief editors of Chinese Journal of Vibration Engineering and Chinese Journal of Solid Mechanics.He is an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences.He won the National Natural Science Prize of second class.
Prof.Hu studied deeply in many branches of engineering mechanics.The most outstanding contribution is that,in 1954,he established a generalized variational principle in theory of elasticity with 15 functions in displacement,strain and stress as independent argument functions.Due to the importance in its theory and approximate solutions,the principle is frequently called the Hu-Washizu principle,and the corresponding functional the Hu-Washizu functional (Prof.K.Washizu,a Japanese,established the same variational principle in 1955).Since it can approximately treat all equations and boundary conditions,the principle provides extremely flexible and wide new ideas with sound theoretical basis for approximate solutions.In the 1980s,He posed and established a theoretical frame for the problem of equivalence of boundary integral equations and the original boundary value problem of differential equations.And then he established equivalent boundary integral equations with direct or indirect unknowns for plane harmonic functions,plane biharmonic functions and plane elasticity.In 1953,he obtained a general solution for the three dimensional problem of theory of elasticity of a transversely isotropic body,which is frequently called the Hus solution in Russian literatures.