Reflecting on the life of Kenneth H. Hunt and his contributions to Mechanism

Abstract

Kenneth Henderson Hunt, see Fig. 1, was the Foundation Professor of Engineering, and the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, Victoria, Australia. He was the Dean of Engineering from 1961 until 1975 and then served as the Chair of Mechanism from 1976 until 1985. He is remembered as the scientist who rediscovered Ball's theory of screws and who made significant contributions to screw system theory which he applied to the kinematics of spatial mechanisms, shaft couplings, and robotics. Kenneth authored two classical books Mechanisms and Motion and Kinematic Geometry of Mechanisms, and co-authored the more modern text Robots and Screw Theory: Applications of Kinematics and Statics to Robotics. He was also one of the founding fathers, contributing to the foundation act with the initial member organizations, of the International Federation for the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms (in 1998 the official name was changed to IFToMM, acronym for the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science). The federation was officially born in 1969 and Kenneth served on the first Executive Council and was the founding chairman of the Australian Committee.