| Citation | An applied mathematician, Atkinson reveals an impressive combination of physical insight and a masterly use of analytic function theory, asymtopic methods and invariant integrals. Though focused mostly towards problems in Materials Science and Engineering, he has displayed exceptional versatility by making substantial contributions in other areas.
His achievements include finding some of the first solutions for dynamically expanding cracks and studies of crack propagation in the presence of a variety of dissipative mechanisms, including plasticity, viscoelasticity and poroelasticity. He has made major studies of cracks at and near interfaces and boundaries and contributed to dislocation theory. His work on diffusive processes in solids, including growth kinetics of ledges, has been incisive. In other completely different fields he has studied the existence of solutions of partial differential equations (particularly, some that model epidemics), stochastic processes (queuing theory), the solution of transcendental equations, the numerical analysis of boundary integral equations and the design of tissue expanders used in plastic surgery. |