Obituary

These are many colleagues and friends around the world who mourn the death of Keith Miller. His contributions to mechanical engineering, to earth sciences and his generosity, have made such a great impact. One of these contributions, the foundation of the journal: ‘Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures’, must be emphasized as a particularly significant achievement, which justifies a special celebration here. Keith Miller was born on the 12 January, 1932 in Blackburn. It is interesting to note that the coat of arms of this town of Lancashire includes three flying bees, like B for Blackburn, which are the emblem of skill, perseverance and industry. Skill, perseverance and industry were no doubt imprinted in Keith’s personality. Nowadays Blackburn is known mostly for its football team, which Keith Miller kept supporting with enthusiasm, one proof of perseverance. He was eager that his friends would share his fervour and he used to invite them to the game when Blackburn Rovers were playing close by. This town was also the birthplace of Alfred Gregory who was the official photographer of the 1953 ascent of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Is there something in the air at Blackburn that introduces a passion for the Himalayas in the blood of its sons? Whatever the reason, Keith Miller would have approved the mentioning of this kinship, he who, after walking through the Lake District in his youth, ambitioned higher summits while he was a student at Imperial College. Blackburn was also a town famous for the textile industry and this perhaps contributed to Keith Miller’s interest in engineering, especially in mechanical engineering. These are the roots, and eventually they led him to study at Imperial College in London where he graduated in mechanical engineering in 1956. Meanwhile he had been president of the Students Union and had organized an expedition in the Karakoram. Walking on the gentle slopes of the Yorkshire Dales, Keith Miller would explain that the famous mountaineers who conquered the Himalayas had acquired their endurance by winter hikes in such districts. He spoke from experience. Much later, after he had suffered very painful problems with his back, necessitating surgery on his spine, he could hardly walk for a while and re-educated himself with great courage and determination. After this he was able to lead a strenuous walk for the participants of the ESIS Conference through the beautiful but rugged hills around Sheffield. After graduating, Keith Miller went on many scientific expeditions, to places such as Greenland, Iceland, Africa, the Karakoram and Tibet. He became interested in the mechanical behaviour of ice and conducted a personal experiment by falling into a crevasse, from which he was lucky to escape. Other experiments included measuring the depth of glaciers using impulse radar devices. However, what made him particularly proud was the expedition, which he led in the Karakoram in 1980. This was the Royal Geographical Society’s 150 anniversary expedition, the International Karakoram Project, which involved 73 scientists from Britain, China and Pakistan. They brought results in geology, glaciology, geomorphology and seismology, which added significantly to the understanding of this part of the world. A book entitled Continents in Collision followed, and Keith Miller was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Many of us were favoured to be in the fascinated audience listening to his vivid lecturing about this expedition and admiring the beautiful slides of the wild mountains. What is quite remarkable is that these activities did not hamper his enthusiasm for mechanical engineering, more particularly, for Fracture Mechanics and, most of all, for Fatigue. From 1960 to 1963 he lectured at Amadu Bello University in Nigeria, before his appointment to a Lectureship at Queen Mary College, London, where he combined his duties with working for a PhD in Metal Fatigue in 1969. He moved to a Lectureship in Engineering at Cambridge University in 1968, and was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity College in 1970. In 1977 he joined the University of Sheffield where he became Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 1982 to 1987 and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering from 1987 to 1989. Keith Miller knew that no theory holds without experimental results and that when solutions were sought for industrial problems, solid data were needed. So in 1987 he founded the now famous ‘Structural Integrity Research Institute, University of Sheffield’ (SIRIUS). For this he had to raise a large amount of money and he was indeed able to persuade 15 top industrial companies, even including Robert Maxwell, to contribute large, continuing, annual donations. Keith, himself, gave to SIRIUS part of his income from his consultancy work. All this enabled him to gather excellent testing equipment, particularly to study multi-axial fatigue. This, plus his continuous interest in developing international relations, attracted students and scientists from all over the world. This interest in international collaboration was reflected in the participation of Keith Miller in the work of ASTM, in the organization of many seminars and workshops. He organized ASTM meetings on multi-axial fatigue and on mixed mode crack behaviour and was the editor of the corresponding STP together with Mike Brown, for the first and with McDowell for the second. He received the ASTM award for achievements in fatigue research. Keith Miller was also president of the International Conference on the Mechanical Behaviour of Materials. Another important contribution to international science and engineering was his participation in the founding of European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS). He became president of this society and organized a successful conference in Sheffield. One of the STP of ESIS on short fatigue cracks was edited by him together with de Los Rios. And once again his generosity contributed to the finances of ESIS. He was awarded the Award of Merit of ESIS as well as the Wöhler Medal, honours really well deserved. It is no surprise that he received many distinctions in addition to those already mentioned: Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, of the Belarussian Academy of Engineering and Technology; Doctor Honoris Causa of Waterloo University Canada, Honorary Fellowship of Imperial College London, Honorary Fellowship in Mountaineering Science University of Central Lancashire, Doctor of Engineering Honoris Causa University of Sheffield; Bernard Hall Prize of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Honorary Fellow of the International Congress on Fracture, of the International Fatigue Congress, of Deutsche Verband für Materialforschung und Prüfung (DVM), Eminent Speaker of the Institution of Engineers of Australia, Mechanics and Materials Award of the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers, Honorary Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University. And then the distinctions pertaining to his geographic expeditions should be added. Something that took much of Keith Miller’s time and efforts, was the journal: ‘Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures,’ which he founded in 1977 and for which he was Editor-in-Chief until 2001. The words included in the title are indicative of what were his concerns. It is noteworthy that he put as much emphasis on materials as on structures, well aware as he was of the close interaction between the two. Besides, adding engineering shows that application of science was one of his chief preoccupations. One of the aims of Keith Miller was to provide a possibility for the dissemination of knowledge, even for scientists who had no easy access to international publications owing in part to difficulties in writing in English. He would spend long hours reviewing papers and rewriting them when he felt they were valuable contributions. He would also pay a great deal of attention to the quality of the figures. He was thus able to put FFEMS on the list of top scientific journals in mechanical engineering. Keith Miller understood the life of fatigue cracks, from their initiation as tiny defects, to their unstable propagation, which is final fracture. He had the ability to clarify these matters and to explain them in a very clear way. An article entitled: ‘The Mechanics and Materials Approach to Fatigue Problems in Engineering,’ published in Engineering Against Fatigue, the proceedings of an international conference held in 1997 (Beynon, Brown, Lindley, Smith and Tomkins eds., A.A.Balkema, Netherlands, 1999) demonstrates his contributions in a field of great scientific and industrial importance. He was particularly interested in the behaviour of short cracks and their interaction with microstructural barriers: grain boundaries, cementite platelets. His contributions in this area greatly clarified a problem that was difficult to tackle owing to the difficulties of observations at the proper level. He was anxious to develop observation tools such as the acoustic microscope. He showed how cracks, propagating from the very beginning and depending on the stress level, either stop at the first barrier they meet or can overcome them. He studied the propagation of short cracks in shear according to the stress state at the surface. The books and articles that he wrote are reference works. See for example: ‘the Three Thresholds of Fatigue Crack Propagation’ in Fatigue and Fracture Mechanics, ASTM STP 1296, (1996), pp.267–286 or ‘The Behaviour of Short Fatigue Cracks,’ European Group on Fracture/ESIS, Publication 1, MEP, Inst. Mech. Eng., London, (1966), Eds: K.J.Miller and E.R.de Los Rios. Aware that in real situations fatigue is seldom uni-axial, Keith Miller undertook to study multi-axial fatigue, both experimentally with the special testing machines that he installed at SIRIUS, and theoretically, introducing the idea that shear strain as well as stress at the crack tip needs to be considered. Again, is highly recommended by to the read ‘Multiaxial Fatigue’, ASTM STP 853, (1985), eds: Miller and Brown. In spite of the debilitating illness that dominated the last four years of his life, Keith Miller had undertaken to write a book about fatigue together with Yukitaka Murakami. We were anxiously awaiting its completion. However, he was such a perfectionist that he would keep correcting what he had already written, and progress was not fast enough. The patience of Catherine who helped him so much with the typing is to be praised. Friends are now working to finish the last chapter and get it published. We are all very eager to be able to read it. Keith Miller had a keen sense of humour. He would make very funny remarks that never offended. I remember a thesis jury of one of my students: I had sent her to discuss her work with Keith Miller in wintertime and she was caught in a snow storm on her way from Manchester airport to Sheffield University. Keith Miller started the discussion in praising her skill, stressing that she had been able to survive in an igloo, which she had been able to build. He then went on, of course to give his favourable appraisal of her scientific work. I found this typical of his friendly, witty approach. How much we will miss his annual letters which we received before Christmas! They were so vivid, so charming, including so many kind words for each one. They were full of restraint when writing of himself, and full of fondness when writing of others. When we are so saddened by the death of Keith Miller, we do not forget the great loss suffered by his family, especially by Catherine, and we express to them our deep sympathy. Keith Miller will remain in our memories, a lucid scientist, a great engineer, a hardworking brave man, a humorous friend. His work will, for many years to come, help students and practitioners understand and better master fatigue, such an ever-present problem in mechanical engineering. Professor Dominique Francois

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