Champion of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Teaching Us to Think Beyond Boundaries

Orlík Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in the Czech Republic, is located on the Vltava River in Bohemia.

The 6-year construction project raised many technical challenges, and required the collaboration of civil engineers, materials scientists, and mathematicians.

Babuška's leadership on the project profoundly shaped his views on the role mathematics and the value of collaboration in solving the world's grand challenges.

Ivo Babuška's work on the Orlík Dam project (1954-1956) was a formative crucible for his future career. The 91-meter-high concrete gravity dam presented a massive engineering risk: as concrete hardens, significant internal heat is generated that can lead to critical
structural cracks.

To mitigate this risk, Babuška led an interdisciplinary team to model the non-linear temperature changes and their resulting mechanical stresses, an entirely new approach for engineering analysis at the time.

Since computers were not yet available in Czechoslovakia, Babuška's team performed over 3 million arithmetic operations on mechanical desk calculators, achieving an incredible predictive accuracy of 1°C.

The project's profound technical challenges shaped his methodological rigor, fostered his early interest in verification and validation of numerical models, and crystallized his commitment to cross-disciplinary engagement.

“On one side are the engineers, and on the other, the mathematicians. I'm proud I was accepted in both worlds, and I've been able to speak both languages. These two languages are different and why collaborations and discussions between them are so complicated.”
- Dr. Babuška, accepting the Neuron Prize in 2014

Signing the Blueprint

Students and colleagues remember Ivo Babuška for his iconic question: Will you sign the blueprint?

Babuška’s deep concern for accountability and rigor in computational work was prevalent throughout his career, driving his pioneering contributions in error analysis and validation.

“Signing the blueprint” became a metaphor for the ultimate test of scientific integrity: would you stake your reputation and the safety of others on the correctness of your calculations? On the Orlík Dam project, Babuška had to do just that.

“If a structure were based on a wrong computation, it could be disasterous.We must always question the numbers, not just believe them.” (2013)