In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Frederick Leckie

Professor Emeritus Frederick A. Leckie, former department head of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, died June 14 at Calvary Hospital, New York. He was 84.

A member of the TAM Department from 1978 to 1988, Leckie served as department head for four years beginning in 1984. During his first six years at Illinois, he held a joint professor position split between TAM and Mechanical Engineering. In February 1988, he left Illinois to become head of the mechanical engineering department at UC-Santa Barbara.

"These have been exciting times for me in the TAM department and I wish I could have stayed a bit longer," Leckie said during an interview after he had announced his intention to leave Illinois for UC-Santa Barbara. "It was a difficult decision, but my age is such that I think this is the last time that an opportunity to move will come along."

Leckie was born March 26, 1929, in Dundee, Scotland. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, first-class honors, from St. Andrews, he spent two years consulting on bridge and tunnel projects, and served three years in the Royal Air Force. In 1954, he came to the United States for graduate work in civil engineering. He received an M.S. in Civil Engineering in 1955 and a PhD in Engineering Mechanics in 1957, both from Stanford University.

Leckie then returned to Europe. He spent a year as a research assistant at Technische Hockschule, Hanover, where he worked on transfer-matrix techniques. He then became a lecturer in mechanical sciences at Cambridge, a position he was to hold for the next ten years.  Concurrently, he was also a fellow of Pembroke College. During that time, however, he collaborated on a textbook, Matrix Methods in Elastomechanics (McGraw-Hill, 1963). During the 1964-65 academic year, he was a visiting associate professor at Brown University. He began his long-standing interest in creep behavior, micromechanics, and bounding theorems during that period.

In 1968, Leckie’s book on Engineering Plasticity was published by Cambridge Press. It was also in 1968 that Leckie left Cambridge to become professor of engineering at Leicester University, where he stayed for ten years before coming to Illinois.

For additional information, please see Professor Leckie’s obituary here.