Egon Orowan

Egon Orowan FRS (Hungarian: Orován Egon) (August 2, 1902 – August 3, 1989) was a Hungarian/British/U.S. physicist and metallurgist.

Orowan was born in the Óbuda district of Budapest. His father, Berthold (d. 1933), was a mechanical engineer and factory manager, and his mother, Josze (Josephine) Spitzer Ságvári, was the daughter of an impoverished land owner.

In 1920 he went to the University of Vienna, where he studied chemistry for one year and astronomy for another. After six months of mandatory apprenticeship done home in Hungary, he was admitted to the Technical University of Berlin, where he studied mechanical and then electrical engineering. Eventually he started his own experiments in physics, where he was adopted as a student by Professor Richard Becker in 1928. In 1932 he completed his doctorate on the fracture of mica.

Soon after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Orowan, who was of partially Jewish descent, left for Hungary, where in 1934 he wrote the famous paper on dislocations he had been doing the experiments for while still in Berlin, which supported the theory put forward in Becker's 1925 paper. In 1934, Orowan, roughly contemporarily with G. I. Taylor and Michael Polanyi, realized that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905. Though the discovery was neglected until after World War II, it was critical in developing the modern science of solid mechanics.

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