Aleksei Gvozdev

Upon completion of his studies at the Moscow Institute of Communication Engineers in 1922, Gvozdev gave lectures there in structural mechanics. He began working in the laboratory for plain and reinforced concrete at the Central Science Research Institute for Industrial Buildings in 1927, continued his career at the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute and in 1933 was appointed professor of structural mechanics at the Moscow Military Engineering Academy. Three years later he was awarded the title of doctor of engineering sciences. Gvozdev published his displacement method independently of Ludwig Mann [Mann, 1927]; his monograph [Gvozdev, 1927] is the first Russian publication on this important object of structural analysis. The book provides “a clear treatment of the nature of this method and the character of the basic system on which it rests, and sets out the properties of the coefficients of the canonical equations, the grouping of unknowns, etc. Aside from that, an extremely general viewpoint is maintained on the possible methods of formation of basic systems and the choice of unknowns” [Rabinovich, 1960, p. 16]. The fundamental theorems of ultimate load theory had already been discovered by Gvozdev in 1936, but they were published only in Russian and then only in the proceedings of the Moscow Academy of Sciences [Gvozdev, 1938/1960], and thus – like his pioneering work on the displacement method – remained essentially unknown to the international scientific community outside the USSR. However, Gvozdev’s publications represent a decisive contribution to theory developments during the invention phase of structural theory (1925–50).

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Obshchii metod rascheta slozhnykh staticheski neopredelimykh system (general method of analysis of complex statically indeterminate systems) [1927]; The determination of the value of the collapse load for statically indeterminate systems undergoing plastic deformation (in Russian) [1938/1960] 

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. 735