Richard Clyde DiPrima (1927 to 1984) was a professor of applied mechanics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, specializing in hydrodynamic stability and lubrication theory.
[1] He continued his studies, first at MIT with C. C. Lin, and then for two years at Harvard with Bernard Budiansky and George Carrier.
He joined William E. Boyce to write Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems, a textbook that is now in its eleventh edition.
In administrative service, he served as president of SIAM, and as chair of the executive committee of the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME.
One year later a conference dedicated to the memory of DiPrima was held at Rensselaer, and the Proceedings published.