AWARDEE OF MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS PRIZE

CHENG GENGDONG

Mr. Cheng was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province,in September 1941. He is a professor and expert on computational mechanics. Professor Cheng graduated from Beijing University in 1964 and was a postgraduate student in DUT during 1964-1968. In 1980, he acquired his doctoral degree in Technical University of Denmark. From 1985 to 1995, he acted as the vice president of DUT, and since 1995 he has been the president of DUT. Professor Cheng was elected academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995.
He serves as the vice president of International Society of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, member of Congress Committee of International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, the vice chairman of the Chinese Association of Mechanics，the chairman of the Science Association of Dalian and the vice chairman of the Science Association of Liaoning Province.
Professor Cheng specializes in engineering mechanics, computational mechanics and structural optimization. In the 1970s, he was devoted to the study of the group theory of structural analysis, and applied it successfully to the standardized design of supporting frames of water towels. He has developed a computing program for the study of the forced vibration of turbine foundation, which has been adopted by many design institutes. He has once participated in the project of DDDU, a structural optimization program capable of handling multi-variables, multi-loads and multi-constraints. His study of solid elastic plates has been esteemed as the forerunner of the contemporary theory of the structural layout optimization, in which he proposes to expand design space including the design of plates with densely distributed and infinitely thin stiffeners for the purpose of achieving a global optimum solution. In the structural topology optimization, he has discovered that the essence of singular optimal solution is the discontinuity of the constraint function and come up with a correct shape of feasible domain. On this basis, he has put forward a relaxation algorithm to the singular optimal solution, which has been considered as a milestone contribution to the issue.
Professor Cheng has won the Second State Prize for the Achievements of Natural Sciences, the Third State Prize for Scientific and Technological Advances, the First Prize and the Second Prize for Scientific and Technological Advances by the Ministry of Education, and the Second Prize of Guanghua Scientific and Technological Fund. He has also won some other different kinds of national prizes. He was awarded the title of an Honorary Doctor respectively by Aalborg University, Denmark in 1999 and by University of Liege, Belgium in 2000.