Ray W. Clough

Ray William Clough, (born July 23, 1920 in Seattle), was Byron L. and Elvira E. Nishkian Professor of Structural Engineering in the department of Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the founders of the Finite Element Method (FEM). His article in 1956 was one of the first applications of this computational method. He coined the term “finite elements” in an article in 1960.
Fall, 2008 Dr. Ray Clough was recognized as a “Legend of Earthquake Engineering” at the World Conference of Earthquake Engineering in China. Dr. Clough is renowned for his pioneering work in the field of earthquake engineering, and credited with the development and application of a mathematical method, finite element analysis, that has revolutionized numerical modeling of the physical world. Dr. Clough extended the method to enable dynamic analysis of complex structures and co-authored the definitive text on structural dynamics. Three decades later, this text is still...