In memoriam to Professor John H. Argyris 19 August 1913–2 April 2004
✍ Scribed by Thomas J.R. Hughes; J. Tinsley Oden; Manolis Papadrakakis
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 72 KB
- Volume
- 195
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0045-7825
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A person with great vision, class and persuasion, who dramatically influenced Computational Engineering and Science and who will be long remembered as one of the great pioneers of the discipline in its formative years.
John H. Argyris passed away quietly on 2 April 2004 after respiratory complications. John rests in peace in Sankt Jorgens Cemetery in the city of Varberg, 60 km south of Goteborg, Sweden, near Argyris' summer house.
John was born on 19 August 1913 in the city of Volos, 300 km north of Athens, Greece into a Greek Orthodox family. His father was a direct descendant of a Greek Independence War hero, while his mother came from an old Byzantine family of politicians, poets and scientists, which included the famous mathematician Constantine Karatheodori, Professor at the University of Munich.
Volos, as it was during his childhood, remained very much alive in his memory, especially the house he grew up in. He vividly remembered, until the end, details of the room where, at the age two, he almost died from typhoid fever. In 1919 his family moved to Athens where he received his initial education at a Classical Gymnasium in Athens. After studying Civil Engineering for four years at the National Technical University of Athens, he continued his studies at the Technical University of Munich where he obtained his Engineering Diploma in 1936. Just after graduation he was employed by a private consulting organization working on the leading-edge technical design of highly complex structures. One of these early engineering accomplishments was that of designing a 320 m high radio transmitter mast with a heavy mass concentrated at the top.
With the outbreak of World War II John was in Berlin continuing his studies at the Technical University of Berlin. Just after the German invasion of Greece, John was arrested and led to a concentration camp, on the accusation of transferring research secrets to the Allies. His savior turned out to be the eminent German Admiral Kanaris, of Greek descent, who arranged his escape by informing the guards that the prisoner would be executed outside the camp. In 1944, Kanaris himself was tragically executed as one of the leaders of the assassination attempt against Hitler. Following his escape from prison, John managed to leave Germany soon thereafter in a very dramatic manner. He swam across the Rhine River during a midnight air raid, holding his passport in his teeth. He managed to reach Switzerland where he completed his Doctoral degree at ETH of Zurich in 1942 in Aeronautics. In 1943 he moved to England and worked as a technical officer at the Engineering Department of the Royal Aeronautical Society of London.
John could never derive any pleasure in ordinary day-to-day work and was only attracted to problems that seemed unsolvable. Even when working in industry, his directors soon realized that the best policy towards John Argyris was to entrust him with intractable problems. At the same time he was fascinated by the properties of triangular and tetrahedral components that appeared to him as ideal elements to build up an engineering system. He could never sympathize with Cartesian analytical geometry that he found most inelegant. During the war, he wrote three classic papers in Reports and Memoranda of the then Aeronautical Research Council. These were concerned with the diffusion of loads into stringer-reinforced stressed skin structures of wings and fuselages. He developed a theory using his intuition that combined differential equations and finite difference calculus that was immediately successful and later confirmed by experiments and applied with great success to British fighter and bomber aircraft during the war. However, the real break-through in his way of thinking and approach to technical problems of solid mechanics was achieved when the first electro-mechanical computing devices emerged in