Walter Guido Vincenti (April 20, 1917 – October 11, 2019) was an American engineer who worked in the field of aeronautics, designing planes that could fly at hypersonic speed.
He was elected as a member of several scientific societies, including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and National Academy of Engineering.
[2] His interest in airplanes began at age ten when, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh made a historic nonstop flight from New York City to Paris.
[1] Shortly before finishing his graduate degree, he accepted a job offer from Russell G. Robinson to work at the Ames Laboratory.
[1] He used the prize money from the Rockefeller Public Service Award to take a year-long sabbatical from Ames Laboratory and travel to Cambridge University.
[1] Some of his accomplishments at Stanford include overseeing the construction of a hypersonic wind tunnel in 1965 and authoring Introduction to Physical Gas Dynamics (1965) and What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (1990).