Arpad Nadai

Westinghouse Electric Corporation

Mechanical Engineer

Awarded Bingham Medal 1952

Dr. Arpad Nadai was born in Budapest and grew up in the Carpathian region of Hungary. Nadai was fascinated by rock deformation from a young age, perhaps due in part to the mountainous landscape around him. After getting his undergraduate degree from the University of Budapest, he relocated to Germany to continue his studies at the Technical University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1911. The Institute of Applied Mechanics at the University of Göttingen hired Nadai in 1918, eventually promoting him to a professorial position and later naming him head of the applied mechanics laboratory.

A larger change occurred in Nadai’s life when he accepted an invitation from Stephan Timoshenko to move to the Westinghouse Research Laboratory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a consulting mechanical engineer. In addition to moving from Germany to the US, this position entailed a move from academia to industry. Nadai embraced his new position, meeting with success as he pursued his research interests in the theory of plasticity. His pioneering work stemmed from his childhood interest in deformation, and his study subjects ranged from metals to insulators. He summarized his findings on fatigue and the high temperature behavior of plastics in Theory of flow and fracture of solids and Plasticity; a mechanics of the plastic state of matter.

Through his collaborations with engineers and geologists alike, Nadai encouraged greater collaboration among material scientists and garnered much respect from his colleagues for both his analytical and experimental work. In addition to the Bingham Medal, Nadai was awarded the ASME Worcester Reed Medal, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Timoshenko Medal, and the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute. The Nadai Medal, established by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1975, continues Nadai’s legacy by recognizing more recently accomplished material scientists.

Sources

Herakovich, Carl T. “Immigrants to United States”. Mechanics IUTAM USNC/TAM: A History of People, Events, and Communities; Springer, 2016; pp. 66.

Interview of M. King Hubbert by Ronald Doel on 1989 January 20, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA. Go to link (accessed June 5, 2019).

Photo Credit

AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Go to link.