D.J. Jourawski
(1821-1891)

D.J. Jourawski was a Russian bridge and railway engineer who developed the now widely used approximate theory for shear stresses in beams. In 1844, only two years after graduating from the Institute of Engineers of Ways of Communication in St. Petersburg, he was assigned the task of designing and constructing a major bridge on the first railway line from Moscow to St. Petersburg. He noticed that some of the large timber beams split longitudinally in the center of the cross sections, where he knew the bending stresses were zero. Jourawski drew free-body diagrams and quickly discovered the existence of horizontal shear stresses in the beams. He derived the shear formula and applied his theory to various shapes of beams. Although the exact theory for shear stresses in beams was derived by Saint-Venant, it is useful in very few practical cases. His name is also transliterated as Dimitrii Ivanovich Zhuravskii.

From Mechanics of Materials, 4th Ed., by J.M. Gere and S.P. Timoshenko, PWS Publishing, 1997, pp. 835-42.