Preface

摘要

Zienek P. Bazant, who is honored by this special issue, was born in Prague, Czech Republic, in December 1937, to the family of a professor of geotechnical engineering, married to a Ph.D. in sociology. His grandfather was a professor of structural mechanics and former university president. Early on, Zdenek fell in love with mathematics and in 1955 became national winner of the Mathematical Olympics. With his first paper published in 1958 he won the national student research competition. On earning (with straight A's) the Civil Engineering degree from the Czech Technical University in Prague (CVUT) in 1960, he became the fifth generation civil engineer in the Bazant family line. He then joined a state consulting firm Dopravoprojekt as a bridge engineer. He supervised construction of an arch bridge over the Vltava River at Zbraslav, and designed several large bridges, including a unique prestressed box-girder at Korenov (with spans of horizontal curvature extreme at that time), and won (with his sister Milada and her husband Ivo Oberstein, architects) the 2nd prize among 18 entries in an anonymous public competition for a bridge over Danube in Bratislava.