page_title: Ramarathnam Narasimhan
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Ramarathnam Narasimhan / Legacy
context_page_description: Ramarathnam Narasimhan is an Indian materials engineer and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his pioneering researches on fracture mechanics and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1999.
context_section_description: Narasimhan's researches have been focused on the theoretical, computational and applied aspects of Solid Mechanics, Fracture Mechanics and Mechanics of Materials. During his post-doctoral days at Caltech, he worked with Rosakis on elastic-plastic solids with regard to crack initiation and growth and their studies on three-dimensional effects on elastic-plastic crack tip fields demonstrated the dominance of the effect at a distance of half the specimen thickness from the crack front. He has also worked on the deformation and fracture behaviour of bulk metallic glasses and is credited with the development of a method for quantifying the micro-mechanics of mixed mode ductile fracture involving microvoid coalescence and shear band. Collaborating with Upadrasta Ramamurty, his colleague at IISc, he worked on fracture mechanics of bulk metallic glasses and these studies enabled them to identify the time scale of fracture as well as to propose an explanation for the nano-trenches. He has documented his researches in several articles; ResearchGate and Google Scholar, online repositories of scientific articles, have listed 103 and 141 of them respectively.
  Narasimhan is a former member of the Science and Engineering Research Board of the Department of Science and Technology. He sits in the editorial boards of journals including Engineering Fracture Mechanics and Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids of Elsevier, and the International Journal of Fracture of Springer. Besides, he is a former member of the editorial board of Current Science journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He has mentored a number of master's and doctoral scholars in their studies and has delivered several keynote or invited speeches including at the Complex Geometry and Operator Theory conference jointly organized by the Indian Statistical Institute and Institute of Mathematical Sciences in December 2015.
caption: The S.S. Schenectady split apart by brittle fracture while in harbor, 1943.
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