Yuan Cheng Fung

Biography

Fung was born in Jiangsu Province, China in 1919. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1941 and a master's degree in 1943 from the National Central University (later renamed Nanjing University in mainland China and reinstated in Taiwan), and earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1948. Fung currently is Professor Emeritus and Research Engineer at the University of California San Diego. He published prominent texts along with Pin Tong who was then at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.

Research

He is the author of numerous books including Foundations of Solid Mechanics, Continuum Mechanics, and a series of books on Biomechanics. He is also one of the principal founders of the Journal of Biomechanics and was a past chair of the ASME International Applied Mechanics Division. In 1972, Fung established the Biomechanics Symposium under the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This biannual summer meeting, first held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, became the annual Summer Bioengineering Conference. Fung and colleagues were also the first to recognize the importance of residual stress on arterial mechanical behavior.

Fung's Law

Fung's famous exponential strain constitutive equation for preconditioned soft tissues is

with

quadratic forms of Green-Lagrange strains E i j and a i j k l , b i j k l and c material constants. w is a strain energy function per volume unit, which is the mechanical strain energy for a given temperature. Materials that follow this law are known as Fung-elastic.

Honors and awards

Fung was elected to the United States National Academy of Science (1993), the National Academy of Engineering (1979), the Institute of Medicine (1991), the Academia Sinica (1968), and is a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1994 election).