The Department of Engineering are this week honouring the work of Professor Christopher Calladine FRS, with a conference on the theme ‘New Approaches to Structural Mechanics, Shells and Biological Structures’.
The Department of Engineering are this week honouring the work of Professor Christopher Calladine FRS, with a conference on the theme ‘New Approaches to Structural Mechanics, Shells and Biological Structures’.
The conference will mark the retirement of Professor Calladine after 42 years on the teaching staff. Former research students, collaborators, and colleagues from around the world, including Nobel Prize Winner, Aaron Klug, will gather to discuss his unique contributions and the new avenues that have been opened as a result.
Professor Calladine, well known for his contribution to the field of structural mechanics, is considered to have made a scientific contribution outside engineering, in molecular structures, at least as significant. It was conversations with Aaron Klug at Peterhouse that first led Calladine into a field far from the normal stamping grounds of engineers, such as the geometric features of protein assemblies and the biological problem of the construction of bacterial flagella.
"What would an engineer know about DNA?" once remarked an eminent biologist at Cambridge about Professor Chris Calladine. He soon proved what he did know; culminating with a book on the subject (Calladine and Drew 'Understanding DNA:the molecule and how it works.' Academic Press, London 1997).
Calladine's work on the design of the Long-Duration Flight Balloons, (the large unmanned helium balloons which provide NASA with an inexpensive means to place payloads into a space environment) illustrates the breadth of his activity. These - after several failures - were recently successfully tested by NASA.
Klug sums him up
"He has the knack of picking out problems which are tractable, or which he makes tractable, by using physical insight to simplify them to their essentials and produce imaginative solutions. Coupling these with simple but powerful mathematics, he explains the phenomena quantitatively, but at the same time provides clear pictures which all can understand. We are in his debt."
The Calladine Conference on Structural Mechanics, Shells and Biological Structures 9-11 September 2002, Department of Engineering.
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