Adrian Bejan is an American professor who has made contributions to modern thermodynamics and developed his constructal law. He is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the books Design in Nature, The Physics of Life , Freedom and Evolution and Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies Early life and education Bejan was born in Galaţi, a city on the Danube in Romania. His mother, Marioara Bejan (1914–1998), was a pharmacist. His father, Dr. Anghel Bejan (1910–1976), was a veterinarian. Bejan showed an early talent in drawing, and his parents enrolled him in art school. He also excelled in basketball, which earned him a position on the Romanian national basketball team. At age 19 Bejan won a scholarship to the United States and entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1972 he was awarded BS and MS degrees as a member of the Honors Course in Mechanical Engineering. He graduated in 1975 with a PhD from MIT with a thesis titled "Improved thermal design of the cryogenic cooling system for a superconducting synchronous generator". His advisor was Joseph L. Smith Jr. Career From 1976 to 1978 Bejan was a Miller research fellow in at the University of California Berkeley working with Chang-Lin Tien. In 1978 he moved to Colorado and joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1982 Bejan published his first book, Entropy Generation Through Heat and Fluid Flow. The book is aimed at practical applications of the second law of thermodynamics, and presented his ideas on irreversibility, availability and exergy analysis in a form for engineers. In 1984 he published Convection Heat Transfer. In an era when researchers did heat transfer calculations using numerical methods on supercomputers, the book emphasized new research methods such as intersection of asymptotes, heatlines, and scale analysis to solve problems. Bejan was appointed full professor at Duke University in 1984. In 1988 he published the first edition of his textbook Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics. The book combined thermodynamics theory with engineering heat transfer and fluid mechanics, and introduced entropy generation minimization as a method of optimization. In 1996 the ASME awarded him the Worcester Reed Warner Medal for "originality, challenges to orthodoxy, and impact on thermodynamics and heat transfer, which were made through his first three books". In 1989 Bejan was