Upon obtaining a Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree from City College of New York in 1944 when he was barely over 19, he became an aeronautical research scientist at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, forerunner to NASA) at Langley Field, Virginia.
He took an educational leave from NACA to enroll in 1947 in the graduate program in applied mathematics at Brown University, completing his Ph.D. in 1950 with a dissertation entitled Fundamental Theorems and Consequences of the Slip Theory of Plasticity.
He made widely cited contributions on the way that fissures and joints in rocks affect the propagation of seismic waves, which has become a standard basis for inferring rock properties in the Earth, and contributed to understanding stressing and deformation in the inflation of the human lung.
He was one of its pioneers, and contributed to explanation of the fracture of ductile metals and the toughening of normally brittle ceramics and composite materials.
He received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University 1986 and Technion Israel Institute of Technology.