We bid farewell to our highly esteemed faculty member Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Smoltczyk. Born in 1928 in Berlin, he studied civil engineering at the TU Berlin and received his doctorate there as well in 1955. After working for the construction company Holzmann in Hamburg, he became associate professor for theoretical soil mechanics at the TH Stuttgart, antecessor of the University of Stuttgart, in 1965. four years later, Smoltczyk was appointed full professor for foundation engineering and soil mechanics and first director of the Institute for Geotechnics in Stuttgart (IGS) of today's Faculty 2. Here he researched and taught until his retirement 1994.
He was an internationally recognized expert for Soil Mechanics and was concerned, among other things, with ground failure as well as with historical and shallow foundations. He also helped develop the "Stuttgart lateral pressure probe" for borehole measurements in the 1980s. Smoltczyk was active in the German Society for Earth and Foundation Engineering (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erd- und Grundbau ) and the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, as well as in the development of the foundation engineering standards of Eurocode 7. For many years, he was editor of the journal Geotechnik, which he founded, and of the Grundbau-Taschenbuch.
The Honorary Doctor of the TU Dresden and the Bundesverdienstkreuz are proof of his recognition in professional circles and in the public.
The faculty thanks Ulrich Smoltczyk for his many years of service and will remember him as a dedicated researcher and university teacher. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)