Ray W. Clough

Ray W. Clough was an American structural engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who coined the term finite element method and did more than anyone to turn it into a working engineering discipline. Trained in civil engineering at the University of Washington (BS 1942) and structural engineering at MIT (PhD 1949), Clough joined Berkeley's Civil Engineering Department in 1949 and taught there for 38 years. Working summers at Boeing in the early 1950s on aircraft dynamics, he developed what became known as the direct stiffness method for representing a continuous structure as an assembly of small, simply analyzed elements; while on a 1956 Fulbright fellowship at Norway's Ship Research Institute he decided the approach deserved its own name, and his September 1960 conference paper The Finite Element Method in Plane Stress Analysis introduced the term into the engineering literature. A second 1962 paper applying the method to stress analysis of a gravity dam did more to convince the profession the method worked on real structures. Clough was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering (1968) and the National Academy of Sciences (1979), and received the National Medal of Science (1994) and the Franklin Institute's Benjamin Franklin Medal in Civil Engineering (2006) for revolutionizing engineering and scientific computation through the finite element method.