Louis-Jean Résal

Jean Résal (22 October 1854, in Besançon – 14 November 1919, in Paris) was a French civil engineer.

He was a professor of mechanical engineering at the École polytechnique, and designed several metal bridges in France, especially bridges above the Seine in Paris:[1] The career of the brilliant student of the École des ponts ParisTech was always an upward ladder: service in the Roads and Bridges Department at the Loire-Atlantique Département and thereafter in the shipping authority in Paris.

Résal succeeded the student of Saint-Venant, Alfred-Aimé Flamant (1839-1915), at the Chair of Strength of Materials at the École des ponts ParisTech in 1892.

All those bridges listed could only be built as a result of Résal’s research into elasticity and the strength of structural steels, work that he summarised in a monograph (1892).

Furthermore, Résal made a lasting contribution to earth pressure theory (1903, 1910), which Albert Caquot would use successfully as his starting point.