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Obituary that appeared in the AIAA magazine, Aerospace America, June 2017:
Ali Nayfeh, a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univerity’s Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, died on 27 March. He was 83.
Nayfeh earned all three of his academic degrees at Stanford University: a bachelor’s degree in engineering science in 1962 and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics in 1963 and 1964, respectively.
Nayfeh joined the Virginia Tech community in 1971. He was a renowned teacher and researcher in the field of nonlinear dynamics. During his 37 years of teaching, Nayfeh advised 69 doctoral candidates to completion. He wrote 10 books, published over 400 articles in refereed journals, and gave over 530 presentations at national and international conferences. From 1980 to 1984 Nayfeh took a leave of absence to establish an engineering college at Yarmouk University in Jordan. He served as engineering dean of the college, and as vice-president for engineering affairs at the university.
His Wiley textbooks entitled Perturbation Methods published in 1973, and Introduction to Perturbation Techniques published in 1981, have been considered worldwide as premier reference texts on asymptotic methods over the past four decades. Nayfeh was also the founder of two prestigious journals: Nonlinear Dynamics and the Journal of Vibration and Control. He also served as the editor of the Nonlinear Science Book Series.
Among his many honors were the 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal of Mechanical Engineering, the 2008 Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies, the 2008 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Tom Caughey Award, the 2005 ASME Lyapunov Award, the 2005 Virginia’s Life Achievement Award in Science, the 1996 ASME J.P. Den Hartog Award, and the 1981 Kuwait Prize in Basic Sciences. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, ASME, the American Physical Society, the Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies, and AIAA. In 1995 AIAA awarded Nayfeh the Pendray Aerospace Literature Award for his seminal contributions to perturbaion methods, nonlinear dynamics, acoustics, and boundary-layer transition.
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