Jerry Gollub, 1944-2019

The first substantive post I wrote for this blog, back in 2013, was a commentary on a paper of Jerry Gollub's, on continuum mechanics in physics education.  I learned recently that sadly, Dr. Gollub lost his life earlier this summer.  An obituary by his renowned collaborator, Harry Swinney, has been posted at Physics Today.  See also this obituary posted at his institution, Haverford College.  I never met or corresponded with Dr. Gollub, but his work has been an influence on mine since I was a junior in college, when I studied from his book with Gregory L. Baker, Chaotic Dynamics:  An Introduction.  In graduate school, the book he edited with Swinney, Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence, was of equal importance to my work.  In my student days, I had these books checked out "long term" from the library, and eventually acquired copies of my own.  DTLR joins the physics and fluid mechanics communities in mourning the loss of this inspiring scientist. 

Since I completed my doctoral thesis in 2001, several other titans I cited in it have passed.  These include V. I. Arnol'd (1937-2010), Robert P. Behringer (1948-2018), Philip G. Drazin (1934-2002), Louis N. Howard (1929-2015), Daniel D. Joseph (1929-2011), Leo P. Kadanoff (1937-2015), E. Lothar Koschmieder (1929-2017), Robert Kraichnan (1928-2008), Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922-2004), Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008), John L. Lumley (1930-2015), Steven R. Orszag (1943-2011), William Hill Reid (1926-2016), Philip G. Saffman (1931-2008), James B. Serrin (1926-2012), and Norman J. Zabusky (1929-2018).  There may certainly be others I am not aware of.

References

G. L. Baker and  J. P. Gollub, 1996:  Chaotic Dynamics:  An Introduction.  Second edition.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.  (First edition, 1990.)

H. L. Swinney and J. P. Gollub (eds.), 1985:  Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence.  Second edition.  Topics in Applied Physics, Vol. 45.  Berlin:  Springer.  (First edition, 1981.)