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April 2013 www.sname.org/sname/mt ( founders and leaders )WALLING: Dr. Savitsky, where did this all start for you? How did you get interested in naval architecture? SAVITSKY: is may surprise you?my original inter- est was not naval architecture, but civil engineering. I was very enamored with structures that were being built. e Empire State Building was being built in my day, and so on. So my interest, when I was in college, which was the College of City of New York (CCNY), here in New York City, I specialized in structures, particu -larly in bridge structures. At that time, well you wouldnt remember, but you probably read about it?there was a dramatic failure of a bridge in Tacoma, Washington, called the Galloping Gertie bridge. It was a very modern bridge, where emphasis in its design was on [making it] lightweight, reducing the amount of steel, keeping costs down, and so on. As a consequence, it had some tor- sional elasticity problems. at was not discovered until it failed, when there was a postmortem on the failure. In any event, the dynamics of bridge design suddenly became very important. Up until that time, bridges were made heavy, there was no consideration given to dynamic loads, except the loads that were imposed by Editors note: When it comes to high-speed planing hulls, you would be hard pressed to ?nd a naval architect who is not familiar with the work of Dan Savitsky. Author of a seminal paper on the subject, published in the ?rst issue of SNAMEs journal Marine Technology in 1964, Savitsky wrote the book?literally and ?guratively? on the hydrodynamics of planing hulls, and is widely regard ed as a legend in ves sel design. He now serves as professor emeritus and senior consultant at the Davi dson Laboratory at Steven s Institute of Technology. (mt) magazine arranged for a Stevens student, Robert Walling, to interv iew Savitsky about his achievements and how he sees the impact his work has had on the develo pment of high-performance ves sels. Walling is a graduate of Webb Institute and has begun his th esis work on planing craft at Steven s. Their conversation covered a lot of ground and in the process touched on the past , present, and future of naval architecture. Daniel Savitsky Game changer in the hydrodynamics of planing hulls