TU Berlin

The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Transport Systems with its Institute for Land and Sea Transport Systems and the Chair for Dynamics of Maritime Systems of Technische Universität Berlin is proud to count Prof. Horst Nowacki among its emeriti.

We congratulate him on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Horst Nowacki has been connected to TU Berlin during long parts of his professional life. He studied Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, worked as research assistant between 1959 and 1964 and finished his PhD thesis in 1963 at TU Berlin. After 10 years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor/USA, he became full professor of the Chair of Ship Design at TU Berlin in 1974 staying here until his retirement in 1998.  In the same year, Horst Nowacki became honorary member of TU Berlin, a very extraordinary distinction. He also served as Institute Director, Dean of the Department, and long-standing member of the Academic Senate [1].

An important insight of Horst Nowacki was that computers could not only be used to compute the fluid-dynamical and other properties of ship designs, but that they could also be used to optimize these designs.  According to him, this has over time pulled apart the designs of “giant tankers, combination bulk carriers, containerships, cruise lines, RoRo ferries, catamaran hulls, SWATH ships, double-hull tankers and many others” [2], each of them finding their unique position in high-dimensional optimization space, and often driven by constraints such as, e.g., a maximum admissible draught.

Moreover, Horst Nowacki’s lectures were very advanced and sophisticated for his time. His name is not only associated with high recognition for his achievements in research and teaching, but also with a fine personality and the fact that he is a very dedicated, helpful and dear colleague who has been committed to naval architecture and ocean engineering at TU Berlin until today and has always been willing to share his extensive knowledge and vast experience with us.

We wish him many more years in hopefully good health.

Prof. Utz von Wagner (Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Transport Systems),
Prof. Kai Nagel (Managing Director of the Institute for Land and Sea Transport Systems),
Prof. Andrés Cura Hochbaum (Chair for Dynamics of Maritime Systems)

[1] TU intern: Professor Horst Nowacki zum Ehrenmitglied ernannt. https://archiv.pressestelle.tu-berlin.de/tui/98dez/nowacki.htm, 1998.

[2] Nowacki H. Five decades of Computer-Aided Ship Design. Computer-Aided Design 42, 956-969, 2010.