Thomas Jaeger

After completing his school education, Thomas Jaeger studied civil engineering at Dresden TH, graduating in 1956 with his diploma thesis on the ultimate load analysis of rigid steel structures. In that same year Jaeger published this work as a journal paper with the title Grundzüge der Tragberechnung [Jaeger, 1956], which was translated into five languages. The editor of the journal Der Bauingenieur, Ferdinand Schleicher, encouraged the young graduate engineer to translate the book The Plastic Methods of Structural Analysis by B. G. Neal (1956) into German, which he did within a very short time [Neal, 1958]. During the same period he translated papers on ultimate load theory by Horne and Baker for the journal Bauplanung – Bautechnik. By the time he was 30 his name had become known both inside and outside Germany, and he thus rose to become one of the advocates of the ultimate load method in Germany. He gained his doctorate at Berlin TU in 1963 with a dissertation entitled Untersuchung zur Grenztragfähigkeit von Stahlbetonplatten; in well over 100 tests he proved that the plastic hinge line theory was a suitable method for quantifying the limit state capacity of reinforced concrete slabs. In the same year he published, together with Antoni Sawczuk, Grenztragfähigkeitstheorie der Platten, which was to become a standard reference book. Jaeger’s professional career lay on the boundary between the construction of nuclear power stations and structural engineering and was to culminate in structures for nuclear engineering: he was to become the founder and primus inter pares of this demanding field of work. In 1964 he introduced this new discipline into lectures at Berlin TU, where he also wrote his habilitation thesis in 1970. He had already founded the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design back in 1965. From 1968 to his early death he was director and professor at the Federal Materials Testing Institute (BAM) in Berlin. While in this position he used the full weight of his personality to set up an organisation for nuclear engineering structures: 1971 saw the founding of the International Association for Structural Mechanics in Reactor Technology (ASMiRT) and Jaeger managed the first five conferences on Structural Mechanics in Reactor Technology (SMiRT). The genesis of the discipline of nuclear engineering structures, which was primarily the work of Jaeger, revealed with a rare clarity the change from the scientific to the technological paradigms in the integration period of structural theory.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Grundzüge der Tragberechnung [1956]; Grenztragfähigkeitstheorie der Platten [1963] 

Source: Kurrer, Karl-Eugen The History of the Theory of Structures, Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH, Berlin (Deutschland), ISBN 3-433-01838-3, 2008; p. 738/739