Daniel D. Joseph was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 26, 1929. He attended the University of Chicago where he obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 1950. After working for
a few years as a machinist, he went back to school and studied Mechanical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, obtaining his B.S. in 1959, M.S. in 1960,
and Ph.D. in 1963. He began working as Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota following graduation and continued there for the rest of his career. He was
promoted to Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics in 1965, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics in 1968, Russell J. Penrose Professor
of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics in 1991, and ultimately Regents Professor in 1994. Joseph held the position of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Aerospace
Engineering and Mechanics from 1994 until he passed away in 2011.
Joseph and his group brought the techniques of fluid mechanics and applied mathematical analysis to bear on problems of rheology by attacking real coupled fluid dynamical
problems rather than by assuming simple imposed kinematics to evaluate constitutive equations. He was a strong advocate of understanding general model-independent changes
to flow fields based on asymptotic solutions in which both the flow and constitutive equation are perturbed together. An example is his method of domain perturbations for
free surface problems which he applied to rod climbing and other nonlinear viscoelastic problems. Joseph’s group used this approach to determine values of the climbing
constant for many fluids over the years and showed how these can be used to determine normal stress differences in the limit of vanishingly small shear rates.
Together with colleagues and students, Joseph also pursued the implications of elastic response for the analysis of hyperbolicity and wave propagation in viscoelastic fluids.
His landmark 1985 paper on hyperbolicity and wave propagation with Renardy
and Saut set a new direction in non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, showing that vorticity was a key variable, with waves of vorticity propagating into fluids initially at rest;
and he invented a wave-meter to measure the speed of such waves. Joseph's group subsequently solved many problems involving change of type from regions of elliptic to
hyperbolic flow and attempted to correlate their measurements with observed phenomena such as anomalous heat and mass transfer in the flow past small wires, drag reduction,
delayed die swell, and the inertial tilting of cylinders settling in viscoelastic fluids, all of which involve the viscoelastic Mach number as a rheological parameter.
Joseph has also carried out basic experiments on delayed die swell and settling of particles in viscoelastic media. He showed that the vorticity transport equation could
become Hadamard unstable in sufficiently viscoelastic flows, and subsequent researchers have established that this instability can frustrate numerical simulations at high
Weissenberg numbers. Workers in the field have since become aware of the structure and consequences of this disastrous instability and devised methods to prevent their growth,
aided in no small part by Joseph's influential 1990 book
on the fluid dynamics of viscoelastic liquids.
In later years, Joseph moved on to study the flow-induced particle microstructures in the motion of bodies through viscoelastic liquids, including sidewise and streaming
attractions between spheres, between spheres and walls, chaining of spheres, tilting of cylinders, and anomalous rolling of spheres down inclined walls. Joseph has developed
a mathematical framework for the precise analysis of potential flows of viscoelastic fluids.
Over the course of his career, Joseph authored six books, ten patents, and 400 journal articles. He also served as Associate Editor of thirteen distinct scientific journals.
He was recognized with a Guggenheim fellowship in 1969, the GI Taylor Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 1990, the Timoshenko Medal from the American Society
of Mechanical Engineers in 1995, the Thomas Baron Fluid Particle Systems Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1996, and the Fluid Dynamics Prize from
the American Physical Society in 1999. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1990) and the National Academy of Sciences (1991), and was named
a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993) and the American Physical Society (1993). He served as a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the University
of Nice and University of Paris from 1980 to 1981 and after his retirement from the University of Minnesota, he was a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of the University of
California, Irvine from 2005. Joseph was awarded the Bingham Medal for brightening the field of rheology through his physical insight, original experiments, interesting
mathematical analysis and his always entertaining lecturing style.
Sources
Joseph, Daniel D. American Men and Women of Science, 29th ed.; Gale: Farmington Hills, MI, 2011; Vol. 1.
Daniel D Joseph.
Physics History Network; American Institute of Physics (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
Daniel D. Joseph.
Fellows; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
In memoriam: Daniel D. Joseph.
College-wide Featured Stories; College of Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
In Memoriam: Samueli School Distinguished Adjunct Professor Daniel D. Joseph.
News & Events; UCI Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
Katepalli R. Sreenivasan. Daniel D. Joseph 1929-2011.
In Memorial Tributes, Vol. 19 (2015) 173-180;
The National Academies of Sciences, Eningeering, Medicine. The National Academies Press (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
Daniel D. Joseph. Fluid Dynamics of Viscoelastic Liquids. Springer-Verlag: New York, 1990.
1999 Fluid Dynamics Prize Recipient: Daniel D. Joseph.
Fluid Dynamics Prize. American Physical Society (accessed Aug 21, 2019).
Note: This biography is an adaptation of the following article previously published by The Society of Rheology.
Daniel D. Joseph, 1993 Bingham Medalist.
Rheology Bulletin 1993, 62(2).
Photo Credit
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.