page_title: William Hovgaard
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: William Hovgaard / Career
caption_attribution_description: The U.S. Navy battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) underway off New York City (USA) during the Naval Review before President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 31 May 1934. Pennsylvania was then serving as flagship of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, Admiral David F. Sellers, USN.
context_page_description: William Hovgaard was a Danish, later Danish American professor of naval design and construction at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1933.
  Hovgaard was one of the foremost authorities on ship design in his generation, especially on the general and structural design of warships. He wrote several books on naval design and construction and the history thereof, but also on a diversity of other subjects, and he received a significant number of orders, awards and merits during his life.
  William was the brother of officer of the Danish Navy Andreas Peter Hovgaard, who led an Arctic survey expedition to the Kara Sea on steamship Dijmphna in 1882/83, and after whom Hovgaard Island in Greenland, Hovgaard Island in Antarctica, Hovgaard Island in the Kara Sea, and Hovgaard Islands in Nunavut were named.
context_section_description: Hovgaard graduated from the Royal Danish Naval Academy at age 21, and next served as a sub-lieutenant and later as a lieutenant in the Royal Danish Navy. He later attended the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, from which he graduated in 1887. He worked for some years for Burmeister & Wain, before attaining the rank of commander in the Royal Danish Navy. He next transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working as a professor, teaching courses such as Warship Design, Theory of Warship Design, and History of Modern Warship Construction.
  In 1915 Hovgaard served as an expert witness after the sinking of RMS Titanic (later he would also give testimony on the RMS Lusitania). Later he served as vice-president in The American-Scandinavian Foundation. In 1929, he was appointed to the Department of Commerce's Committee on Ship Construction, and later the same year he became a full member of the National Academy of Sciences.
  Hovgaard retired in 1933, but continued to be active as a scientist and naval authority for many years. In 1934 he addressed the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston regarding "Fundamentals of the Theory of Relativity".
  In 1937 Hovgaard was honored at a luncheon at the Astor Hotel, under sponsorship of the American Society of Danish Engineers, the Danish Officers' Club, and the Danish Luncheon Club. A letter read at the luncheon from a US naval official noted that 85 percent of the officers in the Navy's construction corps were Hovgaard's former students, and that every one of the Navy's ships currently docked at New York Harbor was constructed under the supervision of his former pupils.
caption: USS Pennsylvania, an example of a US warship built in the 1910s
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