Rate My Professor Nils Myklestad

Nils Otto Myklestad was a professor in Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, serving as Professor of Engineering Mechanics from 1967 until his death in 1972 and also as Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. He earned a BS in Engineering from Den Polytekniske Læreanstalt in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1932, and a PhD in Engineering Mechanics from Cornell University in 1940. Myklestad's extensive career included engineering roles at Westinghouse Electric and Fairbanks Morse (1932-1937); teaching assistant at University of California, Berkeley (1937-1938); instructor at Cornell University (1940); assistant professor of machine design at Illinois Institute of Technology (1940-1942); research associate at Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (1942-1945); professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at University of Illinois (1947-1952); positions at North American Aviation, Aerophysics Development Company, and AiResearch Manufacturing Company of Arizona (1952-1961); professor of engineering at Arizona State University (1961-1967); and consultant to Bell Helicopter Company.

Myklestad specialized in mechanical vibrations, developing the Myklestad Method—a numerical procedure for natural frequencies and mode shapes of beams, published in 1944 in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences—which was extended to coupled bending-torsion vibrations and rotordynamics, influencing analyses of airplane wings, helicopter blades, wind turbines, ship hulls, and launch vehicles. Key publications include Vibration Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 1944), Fundamentals of Vibration Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 1956), Engineering Mechanics (Charles E. Merrill, 1965), Statics of Deformable Bodies (Macmillan, 1966), Cartesian Tensors (Van Nostrand, 1967), and papers such as "The Concept of Complex Damping" (Journal of Applied Mechanics, 1952). His methods aided flutter analysis for the B-36 bomber and Hughes H-4 Hercules. Awards include Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1967), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1969), Gravity Research Foundation Award (1967), and the inaugural posthumous N.O. Myklestad Award from ASME (1991). He held five US patents on shock absorbers and control devices.