Dr. Hunter Rouse played an important international role in the development of engineering hydraulics since 1929. He was at the forefront of the evolution of engineering hydraulics from largely an art in which the hydraulician’s experience and intuition were his primary tools, to a precise well-formulated discipline. He directed pioneering work on such diverse problems as cavitation, hear convection, roughness, flow in open channels, sediment transport, density-stratified flows, boundary layers, turbulence, free-turbulence shear flows, and turbulent diffusion.

Dr. Rouse became a member of Chi Epsilon in 1929 at MIT, where he was an honor student, editor of the student newspaper, winner of two Boit prizes for composition, a skit writer for the Tech Show, a specialty actor for the combined musical clubs, and a member of Tau Beta Pi. He was an Honorary Member of ASCE.

Dr. Rouse’s first book, Fluid Mechanics for Hydraulic Engineers, (published in 1938) was destined to play an important role in advancing the science of hydraulics in the United States. His second book was Elementary Mechanics of Fluids (with Joseph W. Howe). In 1950, Engineering Hydraulics appeared under his editorship as the proceedings of the Fourth Iowa Hydraulics Conference (the forerunner of ASCE’s Hydraulics Division Specialty Conferences). History of Hydraulics, co-authored with Simon Ince, was published first as a bilingual fold-in supplement to La Houille Blanche, and then in book form in 1957. Advanced Mechanics of Fluids, edited by Rouse, appeared in 1959.

Hunter Rouse accepted the Deanship of the University of Iowa College of Engineering in 1966, a post he held until he retired in 1972. Honors received by Dr. Rouse include: the ASCE Norman Medal (1938); the ASCE Karl Emil Hilgard prize (1951 and 1961); the ASEE George Westinghouse Award (1948); the ASEE Vincent Bendix Award (1958); the ASCE Theodore von Karman Award (1963); and the ASCE History and Heritage Award (1980). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1958 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1966. Also, in 1966 he was selected to five the first John R. Freeman Memorial Lecture and in 1967 was elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 1975, he won the first Freeman Hydraulics Prize from the Boston Society of Civil Engineers for the manuscript of this book Hydraulics in the United States, 1876-1976.

In 1979, the Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Lecture was established by ASCE to recognize others who have made significant and continuing contributions to engineering hydraulics. Hunter Rouse had an unparalleled impact on the training of generations of hydraulic engineers.

Dr. Rouse was first elected to Chi Epsilon as an undergraduate student on May 19, 1928, at MIT, chapter no. 9, chartered in 1928, with a general number of 586 and in individual chapter number of 10. He was elevated as the 44th National Honor Member at Arizona State, Tempe, Arizona on November 9, 1985, during the installation ceremonies of Arizona State as the 106th chapter.