Inl. J. Heal Mass Transfer. Vol. 40, No. 17, pp. 3997-3998, 1997
0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
0017-9310/97 $17.00+0.00

Pergamon

PII: s0017-9310(97)ooo97-5

Professor W. J. Minkowycz on his 60th birthday
and his 30th year as editor of theIntemationaIJournal of Heat and Mass Transfer
This commemoration aims to celebrate two significant
milestones: the 60th birthday of Professor W. J. Minkowycz, and his 30th year as an editor of the Znternational Journal ofHeat and Mass Transfer. Dr Minkowycz has excelled as an editor, a teacher and aresearcher. He is well known throughout the international heat transfer community. In this commemorative piece, we wish to convey to the broad
readership of the .journal some of the highlights of
his career so that all can better appreciate the true
importance of his contributions.
Dr Minkowycz was born in Libokhora, about 100
miles south of Lvnv, Ukraine, on 21 October 1937.
With the invasion of the Soviet army in 1944, hisfamily fled Ukraine and for the next 5 years lived in adisplaced persons camp in Neumarkt, near Nurnberg,Germany. In 1949, the family emigrated to the UnitedStates and settled in Faribault, Minnesota, a small
semi-rural community situated about 50 miles southof Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1951, when he was 14years old, his family moved to Minneapolis, where heattended high school and graduated in 1954.
That same year, Dr Minkowycz enrolled in theMechanical Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota. The timing of his enrollment
was propitious in that it coincided with the era inwhich Professor Ernst Eckert was developing a worldclass heat transfer laboratory at the University withthe assistance of Ja.mes Hartnett, Thomas Irvine, andRoger Eichhorn, all of whom have gone on to illustrious careers in the field of heat transfer. For his part,Professor Minkowycz showed an early interest anddeveloped considerable skill in the programming of
the then-existent fledgling digital computers. Whilestill an undergraduate, he participated in numericallybased boundary la.yer research being carried out byProfessor Eckert and his colleagues.
With this background, it was natural that he continue on with graduate study, culminating with thePhD. During this period, he was involved with a wide
range of research projects in addition to his doctoral
thesis. The thesis itself, carried out in conjunction withProfessor E. M. Sparrow, was a seminal study ofcondensation heat transfer. As a result of these activities, he emerged from his graduate work with abroader knowledge base and with an enhanced recordof productivity relative to the typical just-graduatedPhD.
Dr Minkowycz joined the faculty of the Universityof Illinois at Chicago in 1966 and has remained there
to the present day, where he is Professor of Mechanical Engineering. In 1967, at the invitation of Professor James Hartnett, he started his 30-year affiliation
with the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. Their joint editing activities have proved very
fruitful, resulting in the journal’s ascendency to thetop rung among the journals in the field. A sisterjournal, International Communications in Heat andMass Transfer, was founded in 1974. Dr Minkowycz
has been a coordinating editor of Communications
since its inception.
Owing to his early and continuing involvement withnumerical methodologies and their application to thesolution of all categories of heat transfer problems,
Dr Minkowycz was among the first to identify theneed for a world-class journal devoted to the dissemination of new knowledge in numerical heat transfer. Accordingly, in 1978, he joined with the Hemisphere Publishing Corporation(now, Taylor andFrancis) in founding Numerical Heat Transfer. At thetime of its founding, Numerical Heat Transfer was
the first subject-specific journal in the field of heattransfer. The journal has flourished over the years
and, in order to accommodate the broad diversity of
topical material within its purview, it split into twoparts, one designated for applications and the otherdesignated for fundamentals. At present, 24 issues ofNumerical Heat Transfer are published in each calendar year. Dr Minkowycz continues to be the sole
editor of both the applications part and the fundamentals part of the journal.
To both supplement and complement the dissemination of current knowledge via Numerical HeatTransfer, a series of textbooks, monographs, and conference proceedings
was co-institutedby Dr
Minkowycz, again in conjunction with the Hemisphere Publishing Corporation. The series was originally entitled Series in Computational Methods inMechanics and Thermal Sciences. Later, to reflect abroadening of scope, the title was changed to Series
in Computational and Physical Processes in Mechanics
and Thermal Sciences. As of the time of this writing,
the Series encompasses 14 hardbound ‘volumes.

Another pathway of information transfer, which isof particular relevance to practitioners, is the handbook. By the 198Os, there had accumulated a vast
knowledge base of methodologies for both numericalheat transfer and computational
fluid dynamics.

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A. BEJAN et al.

There was a clear need to organize this knowledge
in a manner which would be of greatest utility topractitioners. Dr Minkowycz recognized this need andproceeded to assemble the resources for the development of a handbook devoted to numerical heattransfer and to related topics in computational fluiddynamics. He assembled and led an editorial team,selected a publisher (John Wiley and Sons), andbrought together a collection of world authorities whoauthored individual chapters. The result of these
efforts was a comprehensive
and authoritative
volume, the Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer,which was published in 1988.
The ever-increasing torrent of new knowledge
which motivated the Handbook of Numerical Heat
Transfer also motivated a parallel publishing venture,
one directed at bringing together the status of available knowledge in a form that would be useful toresearchers in numerical heat transfer and in computational fluid dynamics. The publishing venture,again led by Dr Minkowycz, resulted in a new series
entitled Advances in Numerical Heat Transfer, ofwhich Vol. 1 appeared early in 1997. That volume
encompasses 10 definitive articles by world authorities.
Professor Minkowycz’s enormous contributions tothe dissemination of heat transfer knowledge are only
one facet in the totality of his accomplishments. Itappears that the skills which have contributed to hisexcellence as an editor have also exhibited themselvesin the quality of his teaching. Indeed, the excellenceof his teaching skills has set him apart from the average good teacher, both at the undergraduate level andat the graduate level. His technique in the classroom
is simultaneously spellbinding and of the utmost clarity. He has won the national teaching award of theAmerican Society for Engineering Education. Moreover, he has been named a best teacher across theentirety of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He
has received numerous and repeated recognitions
from both the College of Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UIC.
Notwithstanding
his significant commitment oftime to editing and teaching, Dr Minkowycz has madea major mark in research, as witnessed by his 120
papers and by the 41 masters and doctoral students
whom he has advised. The topical coverage of Dr
Minkowycz’s research has been both broad and deep.
His seminal work on natural convection and mixed
convection in porous media, often in conjunction withProfessor Ping Cheng, has to be regarded as having
opened a new area of heat transfer research, as witnessed by the subsequent involvement of hundreds ininvestigators throughout the entire world. Over theyears, he has continued to make major contributions
to the porous media area, including phase change,

non-Newtonian flow, non-Darcy flow, and turbulencemodeling. His early seminal work on condensation
was significantly elaborated by himself and later bynumerous others. Interest in phase-change processes
led him to work on liquid-vapor transformations,with Professor David France as a frequent collaborator. Among other topics in this area, he has dealt
definitively with post-CHF phenomena.
As already mentioned, numerical heat transfer was
Dr Minkowycz’s point of entry into mechanical engineering in genera1 and into heat transfer in particular.
Throughout his entire professional career, Dr Minkowycz has made an eclectic array of contributions
to numerical heat transfer and computational fluiddynamics. Among these, the most ingenious was theadaptation of the methods of artificial intelligence tothe solution of heat transfer problems.
Dr Minkowycz’s contributions to the international
heat transfer community have extended beyond hiseditorial activities. He has served on numerous organizing and advisory committees for international conferences and has presented invited lectures in international forums. In addition, he serves on the editorialadvisory boards of several international journals.
Over the years, Dr Minkowycz has been an active
participant in the affairs of his Department and of theCollege of Engineering. He served a term as Acting
Head of the Department. In all of these activities, hehas built a reputation as a cooperative facultycolleague, a level-headed thinker, and a sensitive, civil,generous, and whole human being.
He has lived happily for several decades with hiswife Diana and his daughter Liliana in suburban
Chicago. Inasmuch as they have attended a numberof international heat transfer conferences with Dr
Minkowycz, they have many acquaintances in theinternational heat transfer community.
Professor Minkowycz’s professional activities havesignificantly elevated and enhanced the heat transfercommunity. He was formally recognized for his contributions by his receipt of the ASME Heat Transfer
Memorial Award. We are very grateful for all that hehas done for us, and we wish him continued professional success, good health, and happiness in theyears to come.
A. BEJAN
P. CHENG
D. M. FRANCE
A. HAJI-SHEIKH
J. P. HARTNETT
T. F. IRVINE, JR
0. G. MARTYNENKO
E. M. SPARROW
C. L. TIEN
R. VISKANTA