Elias Gyftopoulos was elected Fellow of the ASME in 1987 for his “landmark contributions to thermodynamics” and in 1995 was awarded the James Harry Potter Gold Medal, the highest ASME award in the field of thermodynamics, for “advancing the theory of thermodynamics to a new level, while clarifying basic concepts that had been generally misunderstood and while unifying the subject with quantum mechanics, and for the application of the science of thermodynamics in mechanical engineering, to industrial energy conservation, to energy policy, and to specific new technologies.”
Indeed, in the international thermodynamics community, he has been very influential. His crystal clear understanding of the entropy balance made him a leader in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the methods of availability analysis (today better known as second law analysis or exergy analysis) were being introduced systematically in the energy-systems engineering practice. This topic was central for the international group that...
