Person: Flügge, Wilhelm
Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge was a German mathematician and engineer who wrote the standard work on the theory of shells.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Wilhelm attended a Gymnasium in Dresden, graduating in 1921.
- During the years that Flügge was his student, Beyer was working on his most important work Die Statik im Eisenbetonbau Ⓣ(Statics in reinforced concrete construction) (1927).
- Flügge graduated with his doctorate in 1927 and then worked in the construction industry for Dyckerhoff & Widmann.
- This firm, founded in 1865 by Wilhelm Gustav Dyckerhoff (1805-1894) in Karlsruhe, made concrete components.
- It was on this system that Flügge worked during his three years with the company at their Leipzig and Wiesbaden factories.
- Flügge left Dyckerhoff & Widmann in 1930 when he was appointed to a post-doctoral position at the University of Göttingen.
- At the Aerodynamics Research Institute in Göttingen he met Irmgard Lotz (Flügge-Lotz after her marriage) who had recently been appointed as a Junior Research Engineer in Ludwig Prandtl's research group.
- However, as Flügge and Lotz prepared to marry, Lotz's career had progressed well for she had continued research at the Aerodynamics Research Institute making major advances in techniques to predict the aerodynamic pressure on various parts of a plane such as its body, wings, and turbine blades.
- In 1947 Wilhelm Flügge and Irmgard Flügge-Lotz moved with many of their co-workers to Paris, to become part of the Office National d'Études et de Recherches Aéronautiques.
- He realized the advantage of bringing Wilhelm Flügge to strengthen the work in applied mechanics at Stanford.
- With Wilhelm Flügge being appointed as a professor, this meant that, despite Flügge-Lotz's eminence in research, she had to accept a lowly position of "lecturer".
- While at Stanford, Flügge published a number of important books.
- Flügge also edited Handbook of engineering mechanics (1962), an excellent reference book with many authors.
Born 18 March 1904, Greiz, Thuringia, now Germany. Died 19 March 1990, Los Altos, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Germany
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
