Hardy Cross
At the ages of 17 and 18 respectively, Hardy Cross earned B.A. and B.S. degrees from Hampden-Sydney College. After teaching for a short time at Norfolk Academy, he earned a B.S. in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1908. After working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis and returning again to teach at Norfolk Academy, he attended Harvard University. He spent a year at Harvard doing graduate work where he earned a M.S. degree in 1911. Cross began work on his moment distribution analysis method while at Harvard.
Cross continued his teaching career at Brown University, where he was an assistant professor of civil engineering for seven years. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1921. While at the University of Illinois, he further developed his moment distribution method. Before computers were used, analysis of statically indeterminate frames, common in reinforced concrete structures, was very difficult. Cross’s moment distribution method, which was published in an ASCE journal in 1930, changed the way frames were analyzed. This became the primary method of analysis of indeterminate frames until computational analysis was invented.
He was awarded an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale, an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering from Lehigh University, and an Honorary Doctor of Science from Hampden-Sydney. In 1935, he received the Wasson Medal of the American Concrete Institute, and was awarded the Lamme Medal of the American Society for Engineering Education in 1944.