DRUCKER, DANIEL CHARLES

DRUCKER, DANIEL CHARLES (1918–2001), U.S. structural engineer. Drucker was born in New York and studied engineering as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Columbia University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1940. He taught at Cornell University in 1940–43 before serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, after which he joined Brown University in 1946, becoming professor in 1950. He was Dean of Engineering at the University of Illinois in 1968–83. His main interests were the theory of plasticity and its application to designing metal structures. He introduced the universally accepted concept of material stability termed "Drucker's stability postulate" which governs the plastic behavior of metals in response to strain and has wide academic and practical applications. Among many honors and awards he received the National Medal of Science (1980) and was the first recipient of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Daniel C. Drucker Medal bestowed for outstanding contributions to mechanical engineering (1998). While at Brown University, he was active in the Providence, Rhode Island, Jewish community. (Michael Denman (2nd ed.)