Dr. Ali Hasan Nayfeh, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, passed away rather suddenly on Mar. 27, 2017, at the age of 84, in his home at Amman, Jordan. The communities of applied mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, vibration and control, and applied mathematics have lost a premier scientist and engineer, who has been an extraordinarily influential scholar over the past five decades.
Professor Nayfeh was born in Shuwaikah, a small village near Tulkarm in Palestine, on Dec. 21, 1933. He entered Stanford University in 1959 as a freshman and graduated 5 years later with his doctoral degree. He received a B.S. degree in Engineering Science in 1962 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1963 and 1964, respectively. His graduate research work laid the foundation for his seminal work in perturbation techniques, and especially, the Method of Multiple Scales, which he developed in great depth....
