Henryk Zorski, who formally retired from the Department of Mechanics of Liquids and Gases of the Institute of Fundamental Technilogical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1997, obtained his PhD in 1955. He joined the Institute in 1957 becoming in 1960 the head of the Theory of Elasticity Division. He received his promotion to the rank of Professor in 1962 and in 1969 was appointed to the chair of the Department of the Theory of Continuous Media. After eleven years at the helm of this department he moved in 1980 to chair the Department of Mechanics of Liquids and Gases. Over the period of his tenure at IFTR he supervised 18 PhD students, a number of DSc (habilitation) candidates and served on numerous PhD thesis and DSc dissertation committees.
These and many more colleagues have been greatly influenced by Henryk Zorski his research, his enthusiasm and, in perticular, his leadership.

    His research interests range from the theory of plates and shells, elasticity and thermoelasticity to mechanics of media with microstructure and the theory of defects in solids. He has published
to date about 100 papers and has edited several conference proceedings. Henryk Zorski has also been very active in promoting mechanics on both the domestic and the international arena. Together with R.S. Rivlin and G. Fichera he founded in 1977 the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics, becoming its first Secretary and Treasurer and later its Vice-President. In 1975, also with Ronald Rivlin, he organized at Jodlowy Dwór the first International Symposium on Continuous Models and Discrete Systems starting a series of regularly held meetings known as CMDS's, the most recent one held in St. Constantine in 1995. His extensive contributions to different areas of mechanics were recognized by his election to a number of Polish and international scientific societies, to the Academy of Sciences in Bologna and to the General Assembly of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. In 1989 Henryk Zorski was elected a Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

All participants would like to dedicate Proceedings of this conference to Henryk Zorski in celebration of his work.

Marek Elzanowski, Marcelo Epstein, Romuald Kotowski