Richard H. Gallagher, known as Dick to his numerous friends, passed away quietly on the 30th of September 1997 after a long illness, which he fought, gallantly to the end. We mourn his untimely death as we lose a close colleague, a brilliant engineering educator and, above all, a man with a big heart.
He took early retirement two years ago to enjoy the closeness and happiness of his family but this retirement was cut short. In the words that follow we celebrate his achievements and his life and give our thanks for it.
Dick was born on November 1927 in New York City from a Catholic marriage uniting a father with Irish roots and a mother born in Bohemia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had, therefore, all the attributes of a true American. He graduated from the Cardinal Hayes High School and, after serving in the U.S. Navy, enrolled in a Civil Engineering degree course at New York University where he obtained his Bachelor Degree in 1950.
During the next ®ve years Dick worked ®rst as a ®eld engineer with the U.S. Department of Commerce and then as design engineer with the Texas Corporation at their New York oce. Throughout this time he also worked hard as an external graduate student at New York University and was awarded his Master's Degree in Civil Engineering in 1955. With this quali-®cation and his wide knowledge of structural mechanics he was soon recruited to the aerospace industry which was at the time undergoing an important expansion. His work not only led to the development of new aircraft but also inevitably to the achievement of space ¯ight. His employer was the Bell Aero Systems Company in Bualo where his talents were recognised and he was soon promoted to the post of Assistant Chief Engineer.
Dick stayed with Bell Aero Systems until 1967 during the most active period in the aerospace industry when the power of electronic computers was ®rst utilised to perform complex structural analyses. It was here he realised the immense possibilities that were being placed in the hands of the engineer. Here he continued to work on the concept of ®nite elements, introduced by the rival company (Boeing), for the solution of complex stress distributions in continua in the mid ®fties. The opportunities oered by the ®nite element method ®red his imagination and led to much creative research.
Whilst still employed by Bell Aero Systems he became a part-time teacher of evening courses at Bualo University. He was simultaneously working to obtain his Doctor's Degree. He presented a dissertation on the analysis of thin shells by curved elements Ð a subject of great novelty at the time Ð and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1966. However, as early as 1962 he had published the ®rst three-dimensional form of the ®nite element method using tetrahedral elements, in a paper which remains even today a very often-cited classic.
His simultaneous preoccupation with industrial application, academic studies and research is typical of the tremendous eort Dick put into his work throughout his life. The fact that by the time he obtained his Doctorate he was a happily married man and the father of ®ve children probably provided much motivation, and many times throughout his career he acknowledged the contribution to his success made by his wife Terry. As a father, Dick succeeded as a role model for all his children. His four sons and one daughter all became engineers in dierent, but important, ®elds. Surely this is a unique achievement, especially as the choice was entirely theirs.
In 1965 Dick attended two conferences Ð both memorable to me Ð as it was there that our friendship started. The ®rst of these was a mall, but important, meeting at the University of Newcastle, England. The second was a very much larger meeting at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio, which was held in the fall of 1965. This meeting marked an important milestone in ®nite element research. Though the title of this conference `Matrix Methods in Structural Mechanics' was not an accurate description of its contents, nevertheless for the ®rst time all those working in the ®eld of ®nite elements were brought together.
It was shortly after the Wright Patterson event that Dick was persuaded to leave the industry and to become an `academic' as a full professor at the prestigious Cornell University where