Thomas Reif Kane[1] (March 23, 1924 – February 16, 2019)[2] was a professor emeritus of applied mechanics at Stanford University.
He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1938 after Austria fell to Nazi Germany.
In 1943, he enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed in the South Pacific as a combat photographer.
While at Penn, he served as a research engineer and on the committee whose focus was investigating the question of sabbatical leave.
[1] In the 1960s, Kane devised a method for formulating equations of motion for complex mechanical systems that requires less labor and leads to simpler equations than the classical approaches, while avoiding the vagueness of virtual quantities.