Sir Alan Cottrell: Fracture and structural integrity

Abstract

Sir Peter Hirsch’s tribute to Sir Alan’s many achievements in Academic circles and National “Corridors of Power” appeared in the FESI Bulletin 6(1) (2012). Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government; Master of Jesus College; Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University; Writer of seminal Monographs; an inspiration to hundreds, if not thousands, of Metallurgists, Materials Scientists and Materials Engineers the World over, Peter regards him as the most outstanding and influential Physical Metallurgist of the 20th Century: the only one to be awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. In my Materials Science and Technology editorial of July 2009, written to celebrate Sir Alan’s 90th birthday, I was moved to write “If anyone can be said to ‘bestride the World like a Colossus’ it is Sir Alan”. In this piece, I hope to highlight some of the contributions that he made to Fracture and to Structural Integrity, and to recall some personal memories. I first became aware of Professor Cottrell, as the author of Theoretical Structural Metallurgy (1948) and of Dislocations and Plastic Flow in Crystals (1953), when I was an undergraduate at Sheffield: probably in my second year, 1957/1958. In the summer of 1958, I had a vacation job at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough and, perhaps strangely, in the light of all the interest in fatigue following