Yih-Hsing Pao

Pao was born in Nanjing on 19 January 1930.[1] His education and early life were impacted by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War.[2] The Pao family moved from Nanjing to Chongqing following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.[2] His mother taught Pao and his younger brother Michael to read the Four Books.[2] Pao attended National Chiao Tung University, then based in Shanghai, for two years.[2][3] During his time in Shanghai, there were frequent student-led protests supportive of democracy, and he was a member of the student government.[2] Later, his family relocated from Guangzhou to Taiwan.[2] Pao followed them to Taiwan via ship on 30 April 1949, and subsequently graduated in 1952 from National Taiwan University with a degree in civil engineering.[2][4] He received a scholarship from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to pursue graduate study in mechanics, and his father borrowed money to pay for Pao's airfare of US$600.[2] Pao completed his master's degree and continued on to doctoral study in applied mechanics, specializing in wave propagation in solids, at Columbia University.[4][5] Before formally obtaining his doctorate in 1959,[6] Pao joined the Cornell University faculty in 1958.[4][5] In 1985, he was appointed to the J. C. Ford Professorship,[4] a title he retained until retirement and emeritus status in 2000.[3][7]

At the invitation of Li Kwoh-ting in 1983, Pao returned to Taiwan to serve as founding leader of the Institute of Applied Mechanics at National Taiwan University.[2][5] Between 1992 and 1995, he served as president of the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, based in Taipei.[5] In 2009, Pao was formally appointed a Distinguished Research Chair Professor within NTU's Institute of Applied Mechanics.[4] From 2003, he had held a professorship at the College of Civil Engineering and Architecture within Zhejiang University in China.[4]

Pao's honors and awards included election as member of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 1985,[8] and an equivalent honor from Taiwan's Academia Sinica in 1986.[4] He participated in the Humboldt Research Award Programme and is a recipient of the Humboldt Foundation's Senior Scientist Award.[1][9] In 2001, Pao won Taiwan's Presidential Science Prize for Applied Sciences.[3] A conference was held in Taipei to mark Pao's 80th birthday in 2010, and the presented papers, alongside some of Pao's own works, were compiled into a Festschrift titled From Waves in Complex Systems to Dynamics of Generalized Continua, published in 2011.[1][10]

Pao was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 1980.[1] The condition caused him to become blind.[1][2]

Pao was married to Amelia, with whom he raised three children, Winston, May, and Sophie.[1][5] He died on 18 June 2013.[1][5]