Dr. Rokuro “Rocky” Muki, a UCLA civil engineering professor emeritus and an authority in the field of elasticity, died Feb. 10 at his home in West Los Angeles, following a long battle with cancer. He was 75.

“He was a gentleman of the first order and a very gentle person,” said Stanley Dong, a professor emeritus of civil engineering who worked with Muki for 37 years. “His work was very rigorous in terms of scientific and mathematical principles. He was a consummate elastician.”

Muki is perhaps best known for his seminal work on elasticity, entitled “Asymmetric Problems of the Theory of Elasticity for a Semi-infinite Solid and a Thick Plate.” It appeared in the first volume of Progress in Solid Mechanics in 1960.

The field of elasticity is the study of the behavior of solids under various loading conditions — in other words, how solid structures change in shape and volume under applied pressure.

Muki became a member of the faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1967, joining what was then called the Division of Applied Mechanics of the department of engineering. He retired from the school’s department of civil and environmental engineering in 1993.

Muki completed his graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Keio University in Tokyo and was awarded a Ph.D. degree in 1959.

In 1958 Muki came to the United States as a postdoctoral scholar for renowned elastician Eli Sternberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Muki then returned to Japan, where he was an associate professor at his alma mater, Keio University. When Sternberg moved from Brown to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Muki joined him, moving his family to the United States in 1965. Muki remained as a visiting associate professor until joining UCLA in 1967.

Muki was a member of several professional societies, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Society of the Sigma Xi; he was a fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics.

After his retirement in 1993, he began a collaboration with professors Y. Miyano and M. Nakada of the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Japan. Almost annually, Muki traveled to Japan to participate in a series of projects involving the prediction of the strength and life of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics structures under various loading and temperature environments.

“Rokuro Muki was a gentleman and a scholar who will be sorely missed by his friends, colleagues and former students,” said William Yeh, chair of UCLA’s civil and environmental engineering department.

Among his several friends and colleagues at UCLA, many recall lunches spent with Muki in the faculty center, where the engineering professor would talk about poetry and literature.

“Rocky was a very well-read man, not just in his field, but in literature as well,” said Julius “Bud” Glater, an emeritus professor in the civil and environmental engineering department. “At our lunches we would talk about poetry or compare Shakespeare to Confucius. He was a wonderfully inspiring man to talk to.”

“He and his wife are both highly ethical people and they are very good friends,” said T.H. Lin, an emeritus professor in the same department who hired Muki in 1967.

Muki is survived by his wife, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, granddaughter and great granddaughter. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center/Ted Mann Family Resource Center at UCLA.

-Chris Sutton
2/17/04