Richard Gallagher

Richard Hugo Gallagher was born into a Catholic family. His father was of Irish descent, but his mother had been born in Bohemia – the attributes of a true American! Following his secondary education at the Cardinal Hayes High School and military service in the US Navy, Gallagher studied structural engineering at New York University was awarded a bachelor degree in 1950. For the next five years he worked as a field engineer for the US Department of Commerce and thereafter as a design engineer in the New York offices of the Texas Corporation. During this period he studied structural engineering as an external student at New York University and upon completion was awarded a masters degree. Gallagher worked in the Structural Systems Department of Bell Aero Systems in Buffalo from 1955 to 1967, initially as assistant chief engineer. It was here that Gallagher continued to develop the FEM Turner and others had been working on at Boeing. “The opportunities offered by the finite element method fired his imagination and led to much creative research” [Zienkiewicz et al., 1997, p. 904]. Gallagher, working with J. Padlog and P. P. Bijlaard, wrote a paper in which tetrahedron elements appear as early as 1962 [Gallagher et al., 1962] – the very first publication concerning three-dimensional elements. He completed his doctorate at Buffalo University in 1966 with a dissertation on curved (finite) elements for thin shells, and from 1967 to 1978 was professor for civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, teaching and researching alongside the well-known structural steelwork professor George Winter (1907–82); Gallagher took over from him as chairman of the faculty of engineering in 1969. It was at Cornell University that Gallagher was able to continue the work on stability theory and shell theory he had begun at Bell Aero Systems, extend this work considerably and apply FEM to fluid mechanics. He used his visiting professorship at the University of Tokyo in the autumn of 1973 and his research semester at University College, Swansea (UK), to prepare his main work, Finite Element Analysis Fundamentals [Gallagher, 1975], which was translated into German (1976), French (1977), Chinese (1979), Russian (1985) and Turkish (1994) as well as other languages. In historico-logical terms, this monograph can be regarded as a brilliant introduction to the diffusion phase of structural mechanics (1975 to date). Together with J. T. Oden, T. H. H. Pian, E. L. Wilson and O. C. Zienkiewcz, Gallagher visited China in 1981 in order to consolidate scientific contacts in the field of FEM (Gallagher was to return to China on a number of occasions); Shanghai Technical University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1992 for his services to the development of scientific cooperation with China. Gallagher served as dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1984, thereafter, until 1988, he was provost and vice-president of academic issues at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and he rounded off his academic career as president of Clarkson University in 1995. The ASME Medal (1993) and honorary membership of ASCE are just two of the many honours and awards he received.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

The stress analysis of heated complex shapes [1962]; A Correlation Study of Matrix Methods of Structural Analysis [1964]; Theory and Practice in Finite Element Structural Analysis [1973]; Finite Element Analysis Fundamentals [1975]; Finite Elements for Thin Shells and Curved Members [1976]; Introductory Matrix Structural Analysis [1979]; Optimum Structural Design [1979]; New Directions in Optimum Structural Design [1984] 

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. 732/733