A mechanician is an engineer or a scientist working in the field of

mechanics Mechanics (from Ancient Greek: μηχανική, ''mēkhanikḗ'', "of machines") is the area of mathematics and physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among physical objects. Forces applied to objec ...

, or in a related or sub-field: engineering or

computational mechanics Computational mechanics is the discipline concerned with the use of computational methods to study phenomena governed by the principles of mechanics. Before the emergence of computational science (also called scientific computing) as a "third w ...

applied mechanics Applied mechanics is the branch of science concerned with the motion of any substance that can be experienced or perceived by humans without the help of instruments. In short, when mechanics concepts surpass being theoretical and are applied and e ...

, geomechanics,

biomechanics Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch of ...

, and

mechanics of materials The field of strength of materials, also called mechanics of materials, typically refers to various methods of calculating the stresses and strains in structural members, such as beams, columns, and shafts. The methods employed to predict the re ...

. Names other than mechanician have been used occasionally, such as mechaniker and mechanicist. The term mechanician is also used by the Irish Navy to refer to junior engine room ratings. In the British

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against Fr ...

, Chief Mechanicians and Mechanicians 1st Class were

Chief Petty Officer A chief petty officer (CPO) is a senior non-commissioned officer in many navies and coast guards. Canada "Chief petty officer" refers to two ranks in the Royal Canadian Navy. A chief petty officer 2nd class (CPO2) (''premier maître de deuxiè ...

s, Mechanicians 2nd and 3rd Class were

Petty Officer A petty officer (PO) is a non-commissioned officer in many navies and is given the NATO rank denotation OR-5 or OR-6. In many nations, they are typically equal to a sergeant in comparison to other military branches. Often they may be super ...

s, Mechanicians 4th Class were Leading Ratings, and Mechanicians 5th Class were

Able Rating Able seaman is a military rank used in naval forces. Royal Navy In 1653 the Royal Navy introduced a new pay scale as part of reforms following defeat in the Battle of Dungeness the previous year. Included in these reforms were, for the fir ...

s. The rate was only applied to certain technical specialists and no longer exists. In the New Zealand Post Office, which provided telephone service prior to the formation of Telecom New Zealand in 1987, "Mechanician" was a job classification for workers who serviced telephone exchange switching equipment. The term seems to have originated in the era of the 7A Rotary system exchange, and was superseded by "Technician" circa 1975, perhaps because "Mechanician" was no longer considered appropriate after the first 2000 type Step-byStep

Strowger switch The Strowger switch is the first commercially successful electromechanical stepping switch telephone exchange system. It was developed by the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company founded in 1891 by Almon Brown Strowger. Because of it ...

exchanges began to be introduced in 1952 (in

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about I ...

, at

Birkenhead Birkenhead (; cy, Penbedw) is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside, England; historically, it was part of Cheshire until 1974. The town is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the south bank of the River Mersey, opposite Liv ...

exchange). It is also the term by which makers of mechanical

automata An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More ...

use in reference to their profession.

People who made lasting contributions to mechanics prior to the 20th century

Ibn al-Haytham Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham, Latinized as Alhazen (; full name ; ), was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from present-day Iraq.For the description of his main fields, see e.g. ("He is one of the pr ...

motion In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and m ...

Galileo Galilei Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He ...

: notion of strength *

Robert Hooke Robert Hooke FRS (; 18 July 16353 March 1703) was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that ...

Hooke's law In physics, Hooke's law is an empirical law which states that the force () needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance () scales linearly with respect to that distance—that is, where is a constant factor characteristic of t ...

Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, Theology, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosophy, natural philosopher"), widely ...

: Newton's laws, law of gravitation *

Guillaume Amontons Guillaume Amontons (31 August 1663 – 11 October 1705) was a French scientific instrument inventor and physicist. He was one of the pioneers in studying the problem of friction, which is the resistance to motion when bodies make contact. He is ...

: laws of

friction Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction: *Dry friction is a force that opposes the relative lateral motion of ...

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries ...

buckling In structural engineering, buckling is the sudden change in shape ( deformation) of a structural component under load, such as the bowing of a column under compression or the wrinkling of a plate under shear. If a structure is subjected to a ...

rigid body dynamics In the physical science of dynamics, rigid-body dynamics studies the movement of systems of interconnected bodies under the action of external forces. The assumption that the bodies are ''rigid'' (i.e. they do not deform under the action of ...

Jean le Rond d'Alembert Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (; ; 16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the '' Encyclopéd ...

d'Alembert's principle D'Alembert's principle, also known as the Lagrange–d'Alembert principle, is a statement of the fundamental classical laws of motion. It is named after its discoverer, the French physicist and mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert. D'Alembert ...

Wave equation The (two-way) wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields — as they occur in classical physics — such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and ...

* Joseph Louis Lagrange:

Lagrangian mechanics In physics, Lagrangian mechanics is a formulation of classical mechanics founded on the stationary-action principle (also known as the principle of least action). It was introduced by the Italian-French mathematician and astronomer Joseph- ...

Pierre-Simon Laplace Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (; ; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarize ...

: effects of

surface tension Surface tension is the tendency of liquid surfaces at rest to shrink into the minimum surface area possible. Surface tension is what allows objects with a higher density than water such as razor blades and insects (e.g. water striders) t ...

* Sophie Germain: elasticity *

Siméon Denis Poisson Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE (; 21 June 1781 – 25 April 1840) was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electri ...

: elasticity *

Claude-Louis Navier Claude-Louis Navier (born Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier; ; 10 February 1785 – 21 August 1836) was a French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. The Navier–Stok ...

: elasticity,

fluid mechanics Fluid mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids ( liquids, gases, and plasmas) and the forces on them. It has applications in a wide range of disciplines, including mechanical, aerospace, civil, chemical and ...

* Augustin Louis Cauchy: elasticity * Barré de Saint-Venant: elasticity *

William Rowan Hamilton Sir William Rowan Hamilton Doctor of Law, LL.D, Doctor of Civil Law, DCL, Royal Irish Academy, MRIA, Royal Astronomical Society#Fellow, FRAS (3/4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the ...

Hamiltonian mechanics Hamiltonian mechanics emerged in 1833 as a reformulation of Lagrangian mechanics. Introduced by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Hamiltonian mechanics replaces (generalized) velocities \dot q^i used in Lagrangian mechanics with (generalized) ''momenta ...

George Gabriel Stokes Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, (; 13 August 1819 – 1 February 1903) was an Irish English physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Luc ...

* Gustav Kirchhoff: theory of plates *

Josiah Willard Gibbs Josiah Willard Gibbs (; February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903) was an American scientist who made significant theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in t ...

thermodynamics Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws ...

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz Heinrich Rudolf Hertz ( ; ; 22 February 1857 – 1 January 1894) was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. The unit ...

contact mechanics Contact mechanics is the study of the deformation of solids that touch each other at one or more points.Johnson, K. L, 1985, Contact mechanics, Cambridge University Press.Popov, Valentin L., 2010, ''Contact Mechanics and Friction. Physical P ...

People who made lasting contributions to mechanics and died during or after the 20th century

Ludwig Burmester Ludwig Ernst Hans Burmester (5 May 1840 – 20 April 1927) was a German kinematician and geometer. His doctoral thesis (from German: ''About the elements of a theory of isophotes'') concerned lines on a surface defined by light direction. Aft ...

: theory of linkages *

Carlo Alberto Castigliano Carlo Alberto Castigliano (9 November 1847, in Asti – 25 October 1884, in Milan) was an Italian mathematician and physicist known for Castigliano's method for determining displacements in a linear-elastic system based on the partial deriva ...

Elasticity (physics) In physics and materials science, elasticity is the ability of a body to resist a distorting influence and to return to its original size and shape when that influence or force is removed. Solid objects will deform when adequate loads ar ...

Ludwig Prandtl Ludwig Prandtl (4 February 1875 – 15 August 1953) was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of ...

Fluid mechanics Fluid mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids ( liquids, gases, and plasmas) and the forces on them. It has applications in a wide range of disciplines, including mechanical, aerospace, civil, chemical and ...

, Plasticity * Stephen Timoshenko: author of many lasting textbooks, father of modern applied mechanics *

Theodore von Karman Theodore may refer to: Places * Theodore, Alabama, United States * Theodore, Australian Capital Territory * Theodore, Queensland, a town in the Shire of Banana, Australia * Theodore, Saskatchewan, Canada * Theodore Reservoir, a lake in Saskatche ...

, Structural instability *

Richard Edler von Mises Richard Edler von Mises (; 19 April 1883 – 14 July 1953) was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon ...

: Plasticity *

Geoffrey Ingram Taylor Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM FRS FRSE (7 March 1886 – 27 June 1975) was a British physicist and mathematician, and a major figure in fluid dynamics and wave theory. His biographer and one-time student, George Batchelor, described him as ...

, theory of dislocations. *

Alan Arnold Griffith Alan Arnold Griffith (13 June 1893 – 13 October 1963), son of Victorian science fiction writer George Griffith, was an English engineer. Among many other contributions he is best known for his work on stress and fracture in metals that is n ...

: founder of

Fracture mechanics Fracture mechanics is the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the propagation of cracks in materials. It uses methods of analytical solid mechanics to calculate the driving force on a crack and those of experimental solid mechanics ...

* George Rankine Irwin: father of modern

* Warner T. Koiter:

Solid mechanics Solid mechanics, also known as mechanics of solids, is the branch of continuum mechanics that studies the behavior of solid materials, especially their motion and deformation under the action of forces, temperature changes, phase changes, and ...

, Structural instability *

John D. Eshelby John Douglas Eshelby FRS (21 December 1916 – 10 December 1981) was a scientist in micromechanics. His work has shaped the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years and provided the basis for the q ...

: inclusion in elastic body

Honors and awards

by European Mechanics Societ

* Euromech Fello

* Solid and Fluid Mechanics Prize

by Applied Mechanics Division,

American Society of Mechanical Engineers The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is an American professional association that, in its own words, "promotes the art, science, and practice of multidisciplinary engineering and allied sciences around the globe" via " continuing ...

Timoshenko Medal The Timoshenko Medal is an award given annually by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) to an individual "in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics." The Timoshenko Medal, widely regarded as the ...

* Koiter Medal *

Drucker Medal The Daniel C. Drucker medal was instituted in 1997 by the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The Drucker Medal is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the fields of applied mechanics a ...

* Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award * Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award *

Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award The Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics is an award given annually by the Applied Mechanics Division, of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The Award is presented at the Applied Mechanics Annual Dinn ...

American Society of Civil Engineers American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

* Theodore von Karman Medal, ASCE by

Society of Engineering Science, Inc. A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societi ...

Eringen Medal The A. C. Eringen Medal or Eringen Medal is an award given annually bthe Society of Engineering Science(SES) to an individual "in recognition of sustained outstanding achievements in Engineering Science". This award was established in 1976. The ...

William Prager Medal The William Prager Medal is an award given annually by the Society of Engineering Science (SES) to an individual for "outstanding research contributions in either theoretical or experimental Solid Mechanics or both". This medal was established in ...

in Solid Mechanics * G. I. Taylor Medal in Fluid Mechanics

Footnotes

{{Reflist

External links

iMechanica
news and views of interest to mechanicians and their friends.
Homepage of the ASME International Applied Mechanics DivisionMathematics Genealogy ProjectThe MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
Mechanics

People who made lasting contributions to mechanics prior to the 20th century

People who made lasting contributions to mechanics and died during or after the 20th century

Honors and awards

Footnotes

See also

External links