I S I M M. Newsletter 1, To all members of ISIMM. June 10 th, Greetings from the President. Dear colleagues, members of ISIMM,

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1 Dipartimento di Metodi e Modelli Matematici Università di Padova Via Belzoni, 7 I Padova +39(049) / (049) Fax: +39(049) pitteri@dmsa.unipd.it pitteri@tiscali.it montanaro@dmsa.unipd.it To all members of ISIMM THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE INTERACTION OF MECHANICS AND MATHEMATICS I S I M M Prof. Mario Pitteri President Prof. Adriano Montanaro Secretary/Treasurer June 10 th, 2004 Newsletter 1, Greetings from the President Dear colleagues, members of ISIMM, let me first convey to you all, also on behalf of prof. Montanaro, my warmest wishes for a fruitful and successful Special thanks and wishes to Profs. I. Müller and K. Wilmanski for their service to the Society. In particular, Prof. Mueller, now VicePresident, will be the main reference in this recently started office of mine. Let me remind you that this is the year of the periodic STAMM meeting of our Society, this time in Seeheim, Germany (see also item 2. below), where.i hope we all will be able to get together. As we know, the scope of our Society is neither power nor profit (see however item 8 below), so I interpret my role as being coordinator of the initiatives and endeavors taken by individuals or groups of ISIMM members. Therefore, please, convey to me, either directly or through members of the Executive Committee, any ideas that you consider useful for the growth and improvement of our Society. The next gathering of the Executive Committee, to take place within the Seeheim meeting, gives us the closest opportunity for examining, discussing, and hopefully supporting such initiatives. For organizational reasons I recommend that any proposal reach me not later than July 30. Needless to say, communication through is strongly encouraged. Also, anyone who has changed address, or got a new one, should please update Prof. Montanaro and me. For those who may not have received the earlier newsletter here are the basic references for the ISIMM Executive Committee: President Prof. M. Pitteri pitteri@dmsa.unipd.it (until 2007) Vice President Prof. I. Müller im@thermodynamik.tu-berlin.de (until 2007) Secretary/Treasurer Prof. A. Montanaro montanaro@dmsa.unipd.it (until 2007) 1 Prof. Ph. Boulanger phboul@ulb.ac.be (until 2007) Prof. C.O. Horgan Coh8p@virginia.edu (until 2005) Prof. A. Mielke mielke@mathematik.uni-stuttgart.de (until 2007) Prof. W. Müller Wolfgang.H.Mueller@tu-berlin.de (until 2007)

2 Prof. M. Padula (until 2007) Prof. M. Silhavy (until 2005) Prof. L. Truskinovsky (until 2005) Prof. L. Turski (until 2007) Prof. E.G. Virga (until 2005) Prof. A. Visintin (until 2007) 2. STAMM XIV in Seeheim near Frankfurt/Main August 22-28, 2004 Apologies for keeping this announcement posted but some addresses in our database needed updating, so this is meant for those who have not received the earlier newsletters. Professor Kolumban Hutter from Darmstadt is organizing the next STAMM meeting. News about the symposium may be collected from the web-page The dates are chosen so as to cover the week immediately after the IUTAM Congress in Warsaw. That congress is sure to be visited by many scientists from all over the world. Thus ISIMM members who visit the Warsaw event from overseas, may decide to add a week to their stay in Europe and attend the STAMM meeting. The venue will be the Lufthansa training centre in Seeheim-Jugenheim which is in the close neighborhood of the Frankfurt airport and connected to it by a regular direct bus ride of approximately 50 minutes. Because of these favorable conditions as to time and place we hope that STAMM 2004 will become a popular event among ISIMM members. 3. New members Many candidates for membership have been proposed and will be examined within the next meeting of the Executive Committee. The list of members and their addresses is being updated and is part of the ISIMM homepage 4. New Honorary member It has been our pleasure to convey the status of honorary member to Professor Lothar Jentsch, Technische Universität Chemnitz-Zwickau. Professor Jentsch became eligible for this honor upon completing his 70 th year. We have congratulated him and will present him with the certificate of honorary membership. 5. Members deceased With great regret we have learned that our members Professor H. Zorski (Warsaw) Professor O. A. Ladyzhenskaya (St. Petersburg) 2

3 have passed away since the publication of the last Newsletter. Obituaries has been solicited from close collaborators of the deceased, and are published below. We are not always sure that we have all information about our members. We apologize for errors and omissions and welcome any update. 6. Book series Due to the initiative of our publication committee the publication of a series of books has come to fruition. The series is called Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics Series (IMM) and is published by Springer Heidelberg. In the publication agreement it says that the series will cover advanced textbooks and introductory scientific monographs in English language. The authors should be distinguished specialists with international reputation in their field of expertise. Professor Lev Truskinovsky has signed the agreement on behalf of the Society. He is also the editor of the series and he should be approached by members who wish to contribute. We hope and trust that the series will be successful and that in due time it should reflect the progress of our subject which is the promotion of the mutual interaction of mathematics and mechanics. At this time four books are in preparation. Ordered by the projected deadlines they are as follows: R.C. Batra. Theory and Analysis of Piezoelectric Plates I. Müller, W. Weiss. Entropy and Energy a Universal Competition G. del Piero, H. Smaoui. Unilateral Problems in Structural Analysis H. Struchtrup. Approximate Methods in Kinetic Theory. 7. Obituaries Henryk Zorski, Henryk Zorski, Professor of mechanics, the co-founder of the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics (ISIMM) and ist honorary member, a highly respected and very popular member of the international mechanics community passed away on December 26th, He is survived by his wife, Maria Arcisz, her daughter Krystyna, and his son Krzysztof. His sudden and untimely death yields unfinished his lively research activities on geometrical properties of thermodynamics, on a new approach to statistical mechanics of complex systems and on issues in biomechanics and thermodynamical properties of DNA-chains on which he worked during the recent years. Henryk Zorski was born in Cze stochowa (Poland), in a family of lawyers. In the year 1939, at the age of 12 he had to escape the German invasion of Poland and with his family he went to the Soviet Union. In 1941, after the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war, the family was deported east. Henryk's father joined the Polish Army newly formed in the Soviet Union by General Anders and left for Palestine, where he died 1943, without seeing his family again. Until 1945, Henryk and his mother lived in Kazakhstan, where, in order to survive, Henryk obtained one of the most important certificates of his life -- he became a helpmate of an engineer on steamtrains transporting goods through Siberia. Thanks to this occupation he and his mother could survive the hunger of the years of deportation. 3

4 In 1945, after the war came to an end, Henryk begun his education in Warsaw. A year later, he joined his family in England where, despite having to learn English from scratch, he passed his abitur within a year. For a year afterwards he studied at the University of London. After his return to Poland he enrolled at the Wawelberg and Rotwand Engineering School. Upon graduation with distinction as an aircraft engineer in 1951, he was drafted into the army and joined the Military Technical University (Warsaw). There, he received his M.A. degree in 1954 and his Ph.D. in As soon as he was able to leave the army, in 1957, he joined the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research (IFTR) of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His 46 years long affiliation with the Institute continued even after his formal retirement in 1997 and was only terminated by his death. In 1960 Henryk Zorski obtained his first position of importance at the Institute -- he became the Head of the Department of Elasticity which, in 1969, was renamed to the Department of the Theory of Continuous Media. In 1980, after the retirement of Prof. W. Fiszdon, he moved to the Department of Mechanics of Liquids and Gases and served as his Head until his own retirement in Throughout the time of employment at the Institute, Henryk was a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute, as well as a member of numerous subbodies of this Council and of the Institute such as the commissions for Ph.D. promotions and habilitations, Editorial Committees of IFTR's scientific journals, etc. He published around 100 papers and edited several books and conference proceedings. He supervised 19 Ph.D. students, a number of habilitations (D.Sc.) and served as a thorough reviewer of numerous Ph.D. theses and D.Sc. dissertations. These activities greatly influenced the development of continuum mechanics both in Poland and abroad. Such disciplines as the theory of dislocations, theories of materials with microstructure, mechanical theories of DNA-chains, bear the sign of his research work and of his supervision of young scientists from all around the world. In the year 1962 the State Council of Poland nominated Henryk Zorski to a Professor of Technical Sciences. In 1978 he became a member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences of Bologna (Corrispondente straniero della Classe di Scienze Fisiche e Matematiche dell'accademia delle Scienze di Bologna, Italy). His international recognition as a scientist was also confirmed by a membership of the General Assembly of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. In spite of his criticism of the political system in Poland, until 1968 Henryk was a member of the Communist Party. After the violently suppressed student demonstrations in Warsaw and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army accompanied by Polish troops, he decided, however, not to legitimate communism any more by his membership and, notwithstanding vehement protests of communist politicians of the highest rank, he left the party. This courageous step had farreaching consequences. Henryk could not move to a higher position in the Academy until the fall of communism and, in spite of his outstanding international reputation and the esteem and support of such influential Polish mechanicians as Prof. W. Nowacki, he became the member of the Polish Academy of Sciences only in Henryk Zorski lectured and held seminars at numerous major and important American Universities (at Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Caltech, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Brown and at the National Bureau of Standards), as well as at a number of Universities in Germany, Great Britain, India, France, USSR and Italy. But one of the most important features of his professional life has been Henryk's activity in the organization of research. This activity was particularly important in the times of communism. International contacts of many Polish scientists, their stipends and research visits abroad -- in USA, Germany, Italy, France, Sweden and many other Western Countries -- were made possible thanks to Henryk's personal contacts and as a consequence of the various international conferences initiated by him. Many of Henryk's students visited and profited from leading scientists in mechanics and applied mathematics owing to their friendship and high esteem for Henryk. One should mention Prof. G. Capriz, C. Cercignani, J. Ericksen, G. Fichera, R. Knops, E. Kröner, I. Müller, R. Rivlin, T. Ruggeri, C. Truesdell and others. In 1977, together with Professor R. S. Rivlin (USA) and Professor G. Fichera (Italy), he founded the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics (ISIMM). Its biannual conferences, STAMM, were organized in many European countries -- the first one in

5 in Kozubnik (Poland) and the tenth one in 1996 in Warsaw (Poland), with Henryk's great contribution, and they still attract a lot of attention of the scientific community. Another series of conferences were initiated by Henryk and Prof. Rivlin in 1975 in Jodl-owy Dwór (Poland). The first International Symposium on Continuous Models and Discrete Systems (CMDS) has started a series of important conferences under the auspices of ISIMM. As a recognition of Henryk's contributions to science, organizers of some of those international events dedicated them to him. One should mention, in particular, the CMDS8-conference in Varna, Bulgaria (11-16 June 1995), and the Fourth Meeting on Current Ideas in Mechanics and Related Fields held at the Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland (25-28 August, 1997) to celebrate his 70th Anniversary. He has left us not only the results of his scientific and organizational work. These, who had the good luck to collaborate with him have learned a unique style of making science. In spite of the bureaucratic pressure to publish weak or unimportant papers, he always insisted on the highest quality of research. This attitude resulted in many years' delay of some of his own important contributions which he considered to be not ripe for publication -- for instance, his unique work on the statistical theory of dislocations. Notwithstanding his extraordinary knowledge in almost all disciplines of modern physics he never wanted to write a book claiming the lack of competence. This exceptional modesty may serve as a model for new generations of scientists. This remarkable scientist and teacher will be greatly missed by his students, colleagues and friends. As formulated by his friend, Prof. Robin J. Knops: by the death of Henryk we are deprived of splendid company from a diminishing generation of distinguished scientists who contributed immensely to the post-war regeneration of science and mathematics. Krzysztof Wilmanski Weierstrass Institute of Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin, Germany Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya, In the night of January 12, 2004, just before a planned scientific visit to USA, has suddenly died Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya, a world famous scientist who had influenced in a decisive way the developement of the theory of partial differential equations in the second half of the XXth-century. She has written 234 scientific works, in particular, the monographies Mixed problems for hyperbolic equation, Linear and quasilinear equations of elliptic type, Linear and quasilinear equations of parabolic type, Mathematical problems of viscous incompressible flow and others which became reference books of daily use for several generations of Russian and foreign mathematicians. She brought to life or gave an invaluable contribution to such parts of analysis as theory of linear and nonlinear elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic equations, theory of evolution equations in the Hilbert space, attractors theory, approximate methods of solutions of boundary and initial boundary value problems for partial differential equations (in particular, the method of finite differences) etc. O.A. Ladyzhenskaya was born on March 7, 1922 in a small town of Kologriv, in the north of the Kostroma region in Russia. Her father was a talented school teacher of mathematics who had transmitted the passion for this subject to Olga Alexandrovna and to her two sisters. Like many intellectuals in USSR, he was arrested and died in prison in In 1947 Olga Alexandrovna graduated from the Moscow University where her teachers where outstanding Russian mathematicians, in particular, I.G. Petrovskii. Her diploma work was recommended for publication. In the same year she had joined the graduate school of the Leningrad University where her advisor was S.L. Sobolev. She brillantly defended her candidate thesis in 1949 and her doctoral thesis in Since then, for the whole life, she was working in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) as a professor of the Leningrad University and the head of the laboratory of mathematical physics of the Leningrad Branch of V.A. Steklov Mathematical Institute. Together with V.I. Smirnov, she lead a seminar on mathematical physics that is still very active and known as Smirnov's seminar. For many years she was a leader 5

6 of the Leningrad mathematical school in the theory of partial differential equations. Many of her students became well known mathematicians. O.A. Ladyzhenskaya was a member of the Russian Accademy of Sciences and of several foreign Academies. Those who knew Olga Alexandrovna have received the news on her passing away with a deep sorrow, and they will always remember her. V.A. Solonnikov St Petersburg Mathematical Society, St Petersburg, Russia 8. Finances At present the Society holds three bank accounts: 1. Girobank, Bootle, Merseyside, U.K.; no Wilmington Trust Co, Newark, Del., USA; no Banca Antonveneta, Ag. Belzoni, via Belzoni 14/16, I Padova; account no. 1420W, CIN L, ABI 5040, CAB (for transfers within UE: IBAN code IT38L W) While the Society does not levy a membership fee, members are encouraged to pay a voluntary contribution of approximately US $25. This will help to cover necessary expenses or exceptional initiatives. Payments should be send to the account most convenient for the contributor. Mario Pitteri and Adriano Montanaro 6

Professor Henryk Zorski

Professor Henryk Zorski 1927-2003 Witold Gutkowski Krzysztof Wilmanski President of 21st International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM04) and academician of Polish Academy of Sciences,