Arthur Roderick Collar

Arthur Roderick Collar FRS FREng CBE (22 February 1908 – 12 February 1986) was a scientist and engineer who made significant contributions in the areas of aeroelasticity,matrix theory and its applications in engineering dynamics.

Arthur Roderick Collar was born in West Ealing, England, on 22 February 1908, the son of Arthur Collar, owner of a firm of ironmongers and builders' merchants, and Louise Gann. He grew up in West Ealing and, from age five, in Whitstable. He attended the local Board school and then spent eight years as a scholarship student at the Simon Langton School in Canterbury, where he won the school's highest award, the Payne Smith Medal and Prize, and excelled in mathematics, science, music, and sport. An accident during a school football match resulted in the lifelong loss of vision in his right eye. He then attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, also on scholarship, from 1926 to 1929, where he studied both mathematics and physics.

After graduating from Cambridge, Collar joining the Aerodynamics Department at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, where he worked on propellors, airship dynamics, wind-tunnel design, and especially on flutter and matrix analysis. “It is for his research on the application of matrices to the solution of differential equations and dynamical problems,” wrote R.E.D. Bishop in an account of Collar's life, “that Collar's period at N.P.L. Is best remembered.” Collar worked on these challenges in collaboration with Robert Alexander Frazer and William Jolly Duncan. “The collaboration between these three,” according to Bishop, “became so close that eventually separate attributions became virtually impossible to make.”

From 1936 to 1980, Collar was an active member of the Aeronautical Research Committee (later Council), serving in various roles on the Council and its subcommittees; from 1964 to 1968 he was its Chairman. During World War II, Collar led an aeroelasticity research team at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, where according to Bishop the “main work of Collar's section was to try to alleviate or prevent the adverse effects of elastic distortion in aircraft – those of loss of control, vibration and flutter.”

...
Wikipedia