Academic professor Dr. Nikola Hajdin, doctor of civil engineering, president of SANU, was born on April 4, 1923 in Vrbovsko. He is a Serb by nationality. He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade. He graduated from the same faculty in 1951 and received his doctorate in 1956. He was elected a scientific associate of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in 1958, an assistant professor in 1960, an associate professor in 1961, and a full professor in 1966. He supervised the preparation of or was a member of committees for 52 master's and 42 doctoral dissertations at his home faculty, and for a larger number of dissertations at various faculties of the former Yugoslavia, at the University of Athens and Helsinki.
Theory of structures, Resistance of materials and Theory of surface supports, Theory of plasticity, Nonlinear elasticity and Theory of thin-walled supports, these are the subjects he taught in undergraduate or postgraduate studies. He was the president of the Yugoslav group of the International Association for Bridges and Civil Engineering (IABSE) and a member of the standing committee of that organization, the president of the Yugoslav Committee of the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, the dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade, the president of the Yugoslav Association of Civil Engineers.
He was elected a corresponding member of SANU in 1970, and a regular member in 1976. He was the vice president of SANU from 1994 to 2003, when he was first elected president of the Academy.
Nikola Hajdin is a foreign member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Paris, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg. honorary doctor of the National Technical University of Athens. He is a member of: Greek Association for Scientific Research of Metal Structures, scientific committee of the magazine Costruzioni Metaliche (Italy), Swiss Association for Steel Structures, International Association for Bridges and Buildings (IABSE), scientific committee of the International Association for Steel Structures (Eurosteel); he is an honorary member of: the Yugoslav Society of Mechanics, the Yugoslav Society of Civil Engineers and the Greek National Society for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
The scientific method for numerically solving the limit problems of the theory of elasticity, perfected by Hajdin, has found wide application in various branches of technology, especially in construction design, in hydraulic engineering, in the analysis of traffic vehicles... Large arch dams such as Grančarevo, Mratinje and Glažnja were analyzed using of this method.
Academician Hajdin's scientific opus includes 200 works (half published abroad).
Professor Hajdin is a world-renowned author of a whole series of steel, concrete and connected structures. His design accomplishments, especially the Sloboda Bridge in Novi Sad, have been cited several hundred times in scientific literature.
Bridges with diagonal braces are also a problem solved by Academician Hajdin - one of the results of his research is certainly the Railway Bridge over the Sava in Belgrade, completed in 1979.
He was a visiting professor at the Federal University of Applied Sciences (ETN) in Zurich from 1971 to 1973, and he gave a series of lectures at scientific meetings, at prestigious universities, scientific and professional institutions, such as:
University College London (Great Britain), ETH - Lausanne (Switzerland), University of Prague (Czech Republic), University of Bratislava (Slovakia), University of Stuttgart (Germany, University of Dresden (Germany), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China ), Indian Institute of Structural Engineers, Calcutta, Bombay (India), Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects, Vienna (Austria), University of Baghdad (Iraq), Technical Hochschule Aachen (Germany), University of Hanover (Germany), National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Technical University of Timisoara (Romania), Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (Italy) and others.
