David Schaechter originates from Bardstown, Kentucky. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. Later he went on to receive a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. Throughout his academic and professional careers, David has been active in scholarly publications, both as an editor and author. Since then he was Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University for one year, spent four years as a staff scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and since 1982, has worked at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, CA. He is currently a Consulting Scientist for Lockheed Martin, where he leads a group of 15 engineers, who perform a variety of dynamics and control systems analyses of aerospace systems. Since the earliest days of personal digital computers, David been involved, mainly has a hobby, in using computers to solve puzzle, play games, and most recently, perform symbolic manipulation to aid in the analysis of mechanical systems. He is currently the president of OnLine Dynamics, Inc.
Professor Thomas R. Kane
was born in Austria in 1924 and emigrated to the United States in 1938.
After serving as a combat photographer in the South Pacific from 1943-45, he
enrolled at Columbia University where he later received four degrees:
a B.S. in Mathematics,
a B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering,
and a Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics.
After graduating, Tom spent the next 45 years teaching at
the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University
and giving lectures, seminars, and conferences in several languages
around the world.
He has published
10 textbooks and 172 technical papers and is widely acknowledged as the
world's preeminent motion expert and the author of modern dynamics theory
(usually referred to as "Kane Dynamics").
Tom Kane has been been instrumental in the development of Autolev,
providing technical leadership and vast amounts of documentation.
Currently, Tom is a Professor Emeritus of the
Mechanics and Computation Division of Mechanical Engineering
at Stanford University. He is also the President of
Kane Dynamics, Inc.
a consulting company that specializes in providing motion expertise
to the biomechanical, legal, and defense industries.
Since joining OnLine Dynamics in 1988,
Professor Kane has pioneered the effort to bring symbolic
manipulation to the engineering classroom.
He has generously shared his motion simulation knowledge with
three new (1999) textbooks that successfully integrate
symbolic manipulation into the undergraduate and graduate
statics/dynamics classroom.
These textbooks have been recently adopted at several Universities including
University of Florida and University of California, Davis.
Some of his other recent interests are the development of
Animake
(an animation program for Autolev).
"Autolev makes it possible to teach, learn, and practice mechanics
in an exceptionally effective way because, in addition to saving the user
a great deal of time and effort, it furnishes excellent means for
communicating mechanics ideas with clarity and precision."
David A. Levinson holds the position of Staff Aerospace Engineer at the Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto California, where he is responsible for producing special purpose computer programs for predicting motions of complex mechanical systems. Over the years, he has been the recipient of numerous engineering awards, among them the: