Biography

 

After a secondary education is Lyon, crowned with three prizes in the General Examination, a brilliant entry to the École normale supérieure then a year at the École polytechnique, he entered Ponts et Chaussées in 1935. After a short period in Ordinary Service in Haute-Marne, from 1940 to 1954 he served in the central department of technical studies at the Ministry of Public Works (precursor of SETRA), responsible for reconstruction work on structures destroyed in the war. He headed projects on virtually every kind of bridge, including Château-Thierry Bridge, which is a three-section reinforced concrete arch, the Ancenis suspension bridge, the Brest vertical lift bridge….He found appropriate and original solutions, always of great simplicity, to the practical problems confronting builders.The clarity of his presentation and reasoning skills made him a natural candidate for a teaching role at École des Ponts et Chaussées from 1943. In 1951, he succeeded Albert Caquot as professor for the course on the resistance of materials, which he taught until 1978. In 1954, having reached the grade of chief engineer, he left government service at the invitation of Marcel Chalos to join the Major Projects Company in Marseille as head of design and of the research and prestress department.There, he designed prestressed concrete structures, such as the first cantilevered caisson bridges and underwater caisson tunnels.In 1962, he also became a non-executive director of the Infrastructures and Enterprises Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1978. In 1972, Paris VI University (Institute of theoretical and applied mechanics) asked him to teach a course on concrete shells and another on thin elastic plates.Alongside the classical elastic behaviour of materials, he showed the importance of its plastic behaviour for assessing real safety coefficients and set out the conditions for structural durability, building on work done by Albert Caquot.He introduced precise methods for numerical integration into structural calculations, allowing considerable freedom in the choice of forms, in particular in the calculation of arches, in which average fibre distribution and the inertial law were chosen to contribute to the structure’s elegance and behaviour, rather than to allow formal integration.Despite understanding all the possibilities of matrices, he was always ready to provide explanations based on elementary geometry and traditional methods.Jean Courbon would sum up his approach as follows:“For us as engineers, the resistance of materials is not a pretext for mathematics, but a technique that almost always uses elementary mathematical tools, with the aim of obtaining the numerical results needed to build safely.”He received several Academy of Sciences prizes:Rivot Prize (1935), Caméré Prize (1946) and Saintour Prize (1960).He was awarded honorary doctorates at the Lausanne Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Salonika.

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