- Egon Orowan
Egon Orowan ( _hu. Orován Egon) (
August 2 ,1902 —August 3 ,1989 ) was a Hungarian/British/U.S.physicist andmetallurgist .Life
Orowan was born in the
Óbuda district ofBudapest . His father, Berthold, was amechanical engineer and factory manager, and his mother, Josze Spitzer Ságvári was the daughter of an impoverished land owner. In 1928, Orowan commenced his education at theTechnical University of Berlin in mechanical andelectrical engineering but soon transferred tophysics , completing his doctorate on thefracture ofmica in 1932. He seems to have experienced some difficulty in finding immediate employment and spent the next few years living with his mother and ruminating on his doctoral research.In 1934, Orowan, roughly contemporarily with G. I. Taylor and
Michael Polanyi , realised that the plastic deformation ofductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory ofdislocation s developed byVito Volterra in 1905. Though the discovery was neglected until afterWorld War II , it was critical in developing the modern science ofsolid mechanics .After working for a short while on the extraction of
krypton from theair for the manufacture of light bulbs, in 1937 Orowan moved to theUniversity of Birmingham ,UK where he worked on the theory of fatigue collaborating withRudolf Peierls .In 1939, he moved to the
University of Cambridge whereWilliam Lawrence Bragg inspired his interest inx-ray diffraction . DuringWorld War II , he worked on problems of munitions production, particularly that of plastic flow duringrolling . In 1944, he was central to the reappraisal of the causes of the tragic loss of manyLiberty ship s during the war, identifying the critical issues of thenotch sensitivity of poor quality welds and the aggravating effects of the extreme low temperatures of theNorth Atlantic .In 1950, he moved to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, in addition to continuing his metallurgical work, he developed his interests in geological and glacialogical fracture and in what he termed "socionomy". In the latter study, Orowan developed the writings of the 14th centuryTunisia n historianIbn Khaldun to forecast a supposed eventual failure of market demand similar to that claimed byKarl Marx . His ideas found little acceptance among the majority ofeconomist s.Throughout his life, he
patent ed manyinvention s.Honours
*Fellow of the
Royal Society , (1947)
*Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences , (1951)
*Member of the National Academy of Sciences, (1969);
*Bingham Medal of theAmerican Society of Rheology , (1959);
*Gauss Medal of theBraunschweiger Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft , (1968);
*Vincent Bendix Gold Medal of theAmerican Society for Engineering Education , (1971);
*Paul Bergse Medal of theDanish Metallurgical Society , (1973);
*The "Acta Metallurgica " Gold Medal, (1985).External links
* [http://stills.nap.edu/html/biomems/eorowan.html Biographical Memoir of the National Academy of Sciences by FRN Nabarro & AS Argon]
* [http://www.matud.iif.hu/02mar/kovacs.html]
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