William Prager

William Prager (1903 to 1980) was a German-born American applied mathematician who worked in the field of mechanics. Educated at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he earned his engineering doctorate in 1926, he became director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics at Gottingen at only 26 and in 1932 was made professor of technical mechanics at Karlsruhe, the youngest professor in Germany. Forced out after Hitler came to power in 1933, he taught in Istanbul until 1941, when Brown University offered him a post, and there he founded the Division of Applied Mathematics in 1946 and the Quarterly of Applied Mathematics in 1943. His books on plasticity, continuum mechanics and structural optimization became standard references, and he received many honours from engineering and science academies and societies before retiring to Switzerland in 1973.