Aleksandr Dinnik

A. N. Dinnik was the son of a physics teacher and in 1886 he started his secondary education in the humanities department of the grammar school in the town of his birth. He passed his school-leaving examinations with distinction in 1894 and began his studies at the faculty of mathematics and physics at the universities of Odessa and Kiev. Upon completion of his studies in 1899, Dinnik worked at the chair of physics at the Polytechnic Institute in Kiev and later switched to the chair of strength of materials. Dinnik gained his doctorate in 1909 with a dissertation on contact mechanics. He spent the following year studying at Munich TH under professors Arnold Sommerfeld and August Föppl. The year 1911 saw Dinnik appointed professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Novocherkask, and he was awarded the title Dr.-Ing. in 1912 following work on planar plate and shell structures at Danzig (Gdańsk) TH with Prof. G.Lorenz. Just one year later he was appointed to the chair of theoretical mechanics at the Mining Institute in Jekaterinoslav an in 1915 he completed his dissertation Die Anwendung der Bessel-Funktionen bei Aufgaben der Elastizitätstheorie at the University of Kharkov. Dinnik was elected a full member of the Academy of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1929 and from 1946 onwards enjoyed the same status in the USSR Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the publication of the results of his creative work in the field of structural mechanics.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Izbrannye trudy (selected works) [1952–56] 

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. 725