Lazar Kachanov

Lazar Markovich Kachanov was a Russian-American mechanician who founded the field of continuum damage mechanics in 1958 by introducing a scalar 'damage' variable and the concept of effective stress, and whose textbook on plasticity became a classic. Born into a Jewish family in the small town of Surazh, he studied and taught in Leningrad and later emigrated to the United States. His ideas underpin modern models of material failure and creep.