Five in Five

High five to Florida Atlantic University’s Isaac E. Elishakoff, Ph.D., a distinguished research professor in the Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, for publishing five engineering-related books – one each year since 2017.

Elishakoff is a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences; a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts; a foreign member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences; and full member of the Academy of Engineering, Georgia; a fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics; a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; and a fellow of the Japan Society of Promotion of Science.

In 2021, Elishakoff received the “Blaise Pascal Medal" in the engineering field by the European Academy of Sciences, recognizing his outstanding and demonstrated personal contribution to science and technology and promotion of excellence in research and education. His prior recognitions include the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Worchester Reed Warner Medal “for outstanding contributions to the permanent literature of engineering" in 2016, William B. Johnson Inter-Professional Founders Award “in recognition for a lifetime achievement of accomplishments in applied mechanics research and instruction, which affect world-wide advancement" in 2019.

He has published more than 570 original papers in leading national and international journals and conference proceedings. In addition to extensive research and pioneering contributions in several areas of civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering, Elishakoff has developed numerous undergraduate and graduate courses. He is also the author or co-author of 18 books and 14 edited volumes.

Here’s a look at the most recent five:

• Probabilistic Methods in the Theory of Structures: Random Strength of Materials, Random Vibration, and Buckling was published by World Scientific in Singapore in 2017. It is a third extended edition of the first edition that appeared about 40 years ago. The book has been referred to as “an impressive volume," “the best book on the market today," and “a treatise on random vibration and buckling," “outstanding instrument … authored by one of the leaders in the field," by his peers.
• Problems Book for Probabilistic Methods for the Theory of Structures with Complete Worked Through Solutions, was also published by World Scientific, in 2018.
• Handbook on Timoshenko-Ehrenfest Beam and Uflyand-Mindlin Plate Theories, appeared in press in 2020. The classical theory of beams was developed in the eighteenth century by famous Swiss mathematicians Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler. In his book, Elishakoff extends the theory developed in the past century by Ukrainian-American scientist Stephen Timoshenko jointly with Austrian-Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest, making it much simpler and useable.
• Dramatic Effect of Cross-Correlations in Random Vibrations of Discrete Systems, Beams, Plates, and Shells, was published by Springer, Nature, Switzerland, in 2021. It shows that neglect of cross correlations in ships in rough seas, cars on irregular roads and other dynamic regimes are crucial, but often neglected by engineers and investigators, both in their research as well as in numerical codes. The book clarifies a common misconception that natural frequencies of structures are well apart from each other. The book vividly shows that interaction between different modes can dramatically alter the random response.
• Philosophies of Structural Safety and Reliability, co-authored with Vladimir Raizer, Ph.D., deals with three competing philosophies of structural safety and reliability. These are probabilistic methodology, fuzzy-sets based design, and convex modeling of uncertainty. The book was published by Taylor & Francis in 2022. Elishakoff suggests that engineers should embrace all these three methodologies and utilize them according to the availability of data.

Elishakoff says that both the college and the department are promoting the research and creative activities, along with professional service, and the quintessential thing – teaching undergraduate and graduate students.