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In Memoriam – C. Allin Cornell
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com STRUCTURAL SAFETY
Structural Safety 30 (2008) 181–182 www.elsevier.com/locate/strusafe
In Memoriam – C. Allin Cornell
C. (Carl) Allin Cornell, 69, died on December 14 after a two-year battle with cancer. The Stanford Report called him ‘‘the father of modern earthquake risk analysis” (December 20, 2007). He could just as well be called ‘‘the world’s leading expert in structural reliability theory and application.” Born and reared in South Dakota, Cornell came to Stanford to study architecture. His graduate degrees there were in civil engineering, with a doctoral dissertation (supervised by Jack Benjamin) that became the foundation for probabilistic and stochastic theory adapted to practical civil engineering issues. It led to the pioneering book they co-authored, Probability, Statistics and Decision for Civil Engineers. After finishing at Stanford in 1964, Cornell became a Ford Foundation Fellow at MIT, and joined the regular faculty in 1966. Since then his hundreds of papers have defined the field of structural reliability and safety. His 1968 paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America is credited with creating a firm mathematical basis for seismic risk analysis, and his early papers on second-moment concepts established the field of probabilistically-based codified structural design. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1981, at the age of 43. Cornell’s immeasurable contributions to structural safety could fill many pages, but instead I wish to share a few personal items. In the Fall of 1964, he became my advisor as I entered my sophomore year at MIT. He also became a friend and role model. He advised my master’s research in live loads, and he later developed the first comprehensive live load process model. He became my doctoral advisor, and we worked in the field of random vibrations with another doctoral student, Erik Vanmarcke, who later joined the MIT faculty, wrote a seminal text in random field theory, and was the founder and first editor of Structural Safety. I am reminded of Cornell’s sense of humor by an incident shortly after I completed my degree and joined the faculty at Northwestern University. I was back at MIT for a meeting he was running, and when he wanted to clear the blackboard the only eraser he could find was triple size. I called out that they must make very large mistakes at MIT. He quickly retorted ‘‘. . .and we send them all to Northwestern.” Allin Cornell returned to Stanford in 1983, where he supported himself as a research professor for the next 23 years. He made crucial advancements to offshore reliability and probabilistic risk assessment for the nuclear engineering field. Every paper he or one of his students presented brought a totally new and innovative concept or understanding.
doi:10.1016/j.strusafe.2008.01.001
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Ross B. Corotis / Structural Safety 30 (2008) 181–182
Three of Cornell’s doctoral students have already been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His wife, Elisabeth Pate´-Cornell, chairs Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, and one of his children, Eric, won the Nobel Prize in physics. The measure of a great person is his influence on others around him; this legacy lives on and will continue to honor one of the nicest and most sincere, dedicated and selfless individuals our field has ever known. Scholar, genius, innovator, leader. . .these words describe Allin Cornell; but so do friend, mentor, collaborator and gentleman. We mourn the loss of a man who was one of the greatest inspirations to our field, to our profession and to humanity. Ross B. Corotis Denver Business Challenge, Professor of Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA Tel.: +1 303 735 0539; fax: +1 303 492 7317 E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 1 February 2008
Structural Safety 30 (2008) 181–182 www.elsevier.com/locate/strusafe
In Memoriam – C. Allin Cornell
C. (Carl) Allin Cornell, 69, died on December 14 after a two-year battle with cancer. The Stanford Report called him ‘‘the father of modern earthquake risk analysis” (December 20, 2007). He could just as well be called ‘‘the world’s leading expert in structural reliability theory and application.” Born and reared in South Dakota, Cornell came to Stanford to study architecture. His graduate degrees there were in civil engineering, with a doctoral dissertation (supervised by Jack Benjamin) that became the foundation for probabilistic and stochastic theory adapted to practical civil engineering issues. It led to the pioneering book they co-authored, Probability, Statistics and Decision for Civil Engineers. After finishing at Stanford in 1964, Cornell became a Ford Foundation Fellow at MIT, and joined the regular faculty in 1966. Since then his hundreds of papers have defined the field of structural reliability and safety. His 1968 paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America is credited with creating a firm mathematical basis for seismic risk analysis, and his early papers on second-moment concepts established the field of probabilistically-based codified structural design. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1981, at the age of 43. Cornell’s immeasurable contributions to structural safety could fill many pages, but instead I wish to share a few personal items. In the Fall of 1964, he became my advisor as I entered my sophomore year at MIT. He also became a friend and role model. He advised my master’s research in live loads, and he later developed the first comprehensive live load process model. He became my doctoral advisor, and we worked in the field of random vibrations with another doctoral student, Erik Vanmarcke, who later joined the MIT faculty, wrote a seminal text in random field theory, and was the founder and first editor of Structural Safety. I am reminded of Cornell’s sense of humor by an incident shortly after I completed my degree and joined the faculty at Northwestern University. I was back at MIT for a meeting he was running, and when he wanted to clear the blackboard the only eraser he could find was triple size. I called out that they must make very large mistakes at MIT. He quickly retorted ‘‘. . .and we send them all to Northwestern.” Allin Cornell returned to Stanford in 1983, where he supported himself as a research professor for the next 23 years. He made crucial advancements to offshore reliability and probabilistic risk assessment for the nuclear engineering field. Every paper he or one of his students presented brought a totally new and innovative concept or understanding.
doi:10.1016/j.strusafe.2008.01.001
182
Ross B. Corotis / Structural Safety 30 (2008) 181–182
Three of Cornell’s doctoral students have already been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His wife, Elisabeth Pate´-Cornell, chairs Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, and one of his children, Eric, won the Nobel Prize in physics. The measure of a great person is his influence on others around him; this legacy lives on and will continue to honor one of the nicest and most sincere, dedicated and selfless individuals our field has ever known. Scholar, genius, innovator, leader. . .these words describe Allin Cornell; but so do friend, mentor, collaborator and gentleman. We mourn the loss of a man who was one of the greatest inspirations to our field, to our profession and to humanity. Ross B. Corotis Denver Business Challenge, Professor of Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA Tel.: +1 303 735 0539; fax: +1 303 492 7317 E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 1 February 2008