Dear Fellow ISSMO Members,
With deep sorrow, I inform you that our beloved Founder President George Rozvany passed away on July 31. George has made enormous contributions to our research community, most notably by establishing the SMO journal with Jaroslaw Sobieski in 1989 and continuing its editing until the very last moment, as well as founding ISSMO with a group of researchers in 1991 during a NATO ASI conference held in Berchtesgaden.
George Rozvany was a highly prolific researcher who enriched our field with hundreds of publications, some of which have been of milestone importance. He collaborated broadly with many researchers, and his remarkable contributions are too numerous to list. His most influential research contributions include: layout theory for grillage and grid systems in collaboration with William Prager and others started around 1977; the SIMP approach of topology optimization around 1990 in collaboration with Ming Zhou and others; and expanding Michell Truss classes from the early 1990s in collaboration with Tomasz Lewinski, Tomasz Sokol and others.
On a personal note George has made a personal impact to my academic career. I was fortunate to have worked with George, Niels Olhoff and John Taylor and published a joint paper on the solid plate paradox in structural optimization, which bridged his layout theory and solid elastic plate optimization. The last time I met with George was in September last year at a conference in Italy. Even at the age of 84, he showed me his vast research interest and agreed to have a joint research project with my group in Dalian.
With a positive spirit to this very sad moment, I want to say that George has lived an extraordinary life, leaving a lasting legacy to our research community and touching many people’s lives personally along the way. He will be dearly missed by all.
Sincerely,
Gengdong Cheng, ISSMO President