Title: On the Contributions of Pavel Andreevich Zhilin to Mechanics
Abstract: This paper is dedicated to the memory of Pavel A. Zhilin (1942-2005), the great Russian scientist in the field of Rational Mechanics. He was educated and worked at the State Polytechnical University in St. Petersburg (Russian Federation), formerly known as the Polytechnical Institute. As Head of the Department of Theoretical Mechanics he supervised sixteen PhD theses (Candidate of Science theses) and six higher doctorates (Habilitations or Doctor of Science theses), some of them are shown on Fig. 2. His scientific interests covered various branches of Me-chanics and Theoretical Physics. In his research he strived to pave a way based on Rational Mechanics to areas which are traditionally not associated with Mechanics, such as Physics of Microstructures and Electrodynamics. The paper gives a brief summary of the scientific biography and the main results obtained by Pavel A. Zhilin 1 . Pavel A. Zhilin's early publications, his Candidate of Science and Doctor of Science theses are devoted to the development of consistent theory of shells. When he started his research in this area, no general theory of shells was avail-able. For each class of shell-type structures there were particular (and mostly independent) theories: the theory of thin single-layer shells, the theory of struc-tural anisotropic shells, the theory of ribbed shells, the theory of thin multi-layered shells, the theory of perforated shells, the theory of cellular shells, the theory of thick single-layer shells among others, see, e.g., Naghdi (1972); Grigolyuk and Kogan (1972); Grigolyuk and Seleznev (1973). Within each theory there are differences in basic assumptions as well as in resulting equa-tions. The main motivations behind these theories were new applications that could not be described within the existing theories. Between 1975 and 1984 Zhilin formulated the general non-linear theory of thermoelastic simple shells. Some parts of this theory differ fundamentally from the other approaches in the shell theory discussed, for example, in Reissner (1985).