In memory of Professor Raffaele Casciaro
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COMMEMORATION
In memory of Professor Raffaele Casciaro Giovanni Garcea
Published online: 12 October 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract It is with profound sadness that we share the news that Prof. Raffaele Casciaro passed away on 27 July 2020. He is buried in his beloved Rossano, a small city in southeast Italy, where he was born in 1943. It is not easy to describe, in just a few sentences, the extraordinary human and scientific personality of Raffaele. He was an unattainable model to imitate, a mentor and a friend not only for us, but also for many other colleagues from outside the computational mechanics group of the University of Calabria. He left an indelible mark on the professional and personal lives of all of us and his absence arouses a deep sense of emptiness. We attempt to describe the scientific character of Raffaele and what he symbolizes to those who knew him and held him in high esteem.
1 Scientific activity After a short research period in Rome ‘‘La Sapienza’’, where he earned his master degree in civil engineering (1967), he moved to the University of Calabria
G. Garcea (&) Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Modellistica, Elettronica e Sistemistica, University of Calabria, Rende, CS, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
(UNICAL) where he spent his entire academic career life. In 1972 Raffaele became Assistant Professor at the chair of ‘‘Scienza delle Costruzioni’’ (Solid and Structural Mechanics) and in 1988 Full Professor in the same field. His scientific interests, since the early 1970s, were focused on computational mechanics. Raffaele foresaw the great potential of computational mechanics which, he believed, have played a key role in structural analysis and in the related research activities. It is worth noting that, at that time, computers were used only in the major research centers or university laboratories and their computational power, memory and software capabilities were incomparably lower than those we have today. Based on his belief, he became one of the pioneers and founders of the Italian Group of Computational Mechanics. In the late 1980s, he gave a significant contribution to establishing a PhD course in ‘‘Computational Mechanics’’ at UNICAL, which was the first in Italy in this research area and with this name. Over the years, this course has attracted many young students, most of whom are now researchers or professors at Italian and overseas universities. Raffaele (Fig. 1) was an outstanding Italian researcher of his time. His scientific activities have always been aimed at developing structural models and numerical methods for simulating the mechanical behavior of structures. In doing that he firmly believed that research must be driven by practical problems.
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Fig. 1 A recent picture of Raffaele
His scientific contributions have covered variety of topics: limit and shakedown analysis, structural dynamics, nonlinear analysis of slender structures prone to buckle, modeling of geotechnical problems, solu
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