Olgierd Zienkiewicz

British academic of Polish descent, mathematician and civil engineer

Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz (18 May 1921 – 2 January 2009) was a British academic of Polish descent, mathematician, and civil engineer. He was born in Caterham, England. He was one of the early pioneers of the finite element method. Since his first paper in 1947 dealing with numerical approximation to the stress analysis of dams, he published nearly 600 papers and wrote or edited more than 25 books.

His school education took place in Poland, where his father was a judge of the Katowice district. He and his family moved to the UK due to World War II. Zienkiewicz studied in the early 1940s at Imperial College London for an undergraduate BSc (Hons) degree in civil engineering which he obtained in 1943 with first class honours. Then, after being offered a scholarship, he stayed for two more years at Imperial College to carry out research on dams under the supervision of Professors Alfred Pippard and Sir Richard V. Southwell. He was awarded the PhD degree in 1945 with his thesis title "Classical theories of gravity dam design in the light of modern analytical methods".

Zienkiewicz was notable for having recognized the general potential for using the finite element method to resolve problems in areas outside the area of solid mechanics. The idea behind finite elements design is to develop tools based in computational mechanics schemes that can be useful to designers, not solely for research purposes. His books on the Finite Element Method were the first to present the subject and to this day remain the standard reference texts. He also founded the first journal dealing with computational mechanics in 1968 (International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering), which is still the major journal for the field of Numerical Computations. honorary degrees from Ireland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, China, Poland, Scotland, Wales, France, England, Italy, Portugal, Hungary and the United States. He was instrumental in setting up the association of computational mechanics in engineering (ACME) for the United Kingdom in 1992 and was the honorary president for the association for the rest of his life. The Institution of Civil Engineers awards a prize in his honour biennially. The Zienkiewicz Numerical Methods in Engineering Prize was instituted in 1998 following a donation by John Wiley & Sons Ltd to commemorate his work in Numerical Methods in Engineering.