Timothy J. Healey

Timothy Healey is an American applied mathematician working in the areas of nolinear elasticity, nonlinear partial differential equations, bifurcation theory and the calculus of variations. He is currently a professor in the Department of Mathematics, Cornell University.
Healey is known for his mathematical contributions to nonlinear elasticity particularly the use of group-theoretic methods in global bifurcation problems.

Education and career

Healey received his bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Missouri in 1976 and worked as a structural engineer between 1978 and 1980. He received his PhD in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985 under the guidance of Robert Muncaster in mathematics with mentoring from Donald Carlson and Arthur Robinson in mechanics. He spent a postdoctoral year with Stuart Antman and P. Michael Fitzpatrick at the University of Maryland before joining the faculty at Cornell University, where he has held full-time positions in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Mechanical and Aerospace engineering and Mathematics.

Research

Healey's research focuses on mathematical aspects of elasticity theory. In his early career, he made fundamental contributions to the study of global bifurcation in problems with symmetry using group-theoretic methods. Along with H. Simpson, he developed a topological degree similar to the Leray-Schauder degree which leads to the existence of solutions in nonlinear elasticity. Healey's work on transverse hemitropy and isotropy in Cosserat rod theory is well known and is a natural setting for studying the mechanics of ropes, cables and biological filaments such as DNA. He has also established existence theorems for thin, nonlinearly elastic shells undergoing large membrane strains.