John W. Neuberger (1934-2020)
Professor John W. Neuberger had a long distinguished career. He impacted the mathematics community through not only his prolific research work but also by training and influencing generations of researchers, including over 30 Ph.D. students.
He graduated valedictorian in a class of seven from a rural south Texas high school. As the only student not involved with the six-man football team, he was the entire school newspaper staff. He worked part-time for his dad's butane business, and owned and ran a hamburger and malt stand. Leaving home at age 16, John completed his Ph.D. degree in mathematics under H.S. Wall at the University of Texas at the age of 21 years. While he went up very quickly in the academic ranks he was always aware of the needs of the people around him including undergraduate students. He was always helping graduate students obtain financial support, international students or professors on issues of immigration, and faculty members in their progress to tenure and promotion. To his last days, even beyond his retirement in 2006, John was passionate to the furthering of mathematics and his understanding of it. When asked, he would explain that to him doing mathematics was like eating ice cream, that he could not get enough of it.
The larger than life professor John W. Neuberger that the mathematical community met at professional meetings was even more impressive to those who worked with him on a day to day basis. His dedication, encyclopedic knowledge, humility, and enthusiasm made every day more exciting that the day before. Proposals of the type: let us look at this problem, let us organize a seminar on this, let us host this meeting, let us invite this professor or student, or let us write this grant application would not only find his unequivocal approval but also his creative ideas on how to enhance it. When the idea of the EJDE was presented to John he immediately accepted the invitation to serve on the editorial board and to submit an article to the new journal. When the first occasion came up to host the Texas Seminar in Differential Equations he immediately volunteered: "and I will host a party at my house".
John considered listening and giving talks on current research to be a vital part of his career and an endless source of inspiration for research and opportunity to make new friends and discuss mathematics and life with old ones. John was one of the most prolific travelers and presenters of mathematics among the mathematicians of his time. His visiting lectures and seminars at institutions of research and learning were frequent and often extended visits, in all corners of the USA and in many different countries. He was a popular and charismatic speaker. After giving a talk, he would always come away with requests to revisit and new opportunities to visit elsewhere. He attended and participated in numerous big conferences, including over 50 uninterrupted years of the AMS/MAA joint winter meetings.
John enjoyed the smaller targeted events even more where he avowed more real work was done, e.g., the Texas PDE Seminar. His wife Barbara accompanied him on most of his travels, and longer trips often included the whole family. His travels and presentations continued until even after his retirement in 2006.
John's research was diverse, ranging from early work in analytic continuation, to semigroups, and numerical solutions of partial differential equations. One area in which John made many significant mathematical contributions concerned Sobolev gradients, which may as well be called Neuberger gradients. Essentially, he took the view that if one made the right choice of inner product, then steepest descent was in fact an efficient and effective way to solve many differential equations. He spent decades trying to get the message out that there was an alternative to the myriad of somewhat ad hoc traditional techniques of scientific computation and numerical analysis, e.g., preconditioners. John developed the skill to investigate a wide range of different types of PDE, under a variety of initial and boundary conditions. Much of his consulting work was in applying his Sobolev gradient methods to problems in physics and engineering, e.g., Ginzburg-Landau equations. John published two Springer editions of a graduate textbook and over 17 related articles on the subject.
The very first article published by the EJDE was his seminal work with Robert Dorroh on Lie generators of semigroups. This work led to the fundamental characterization of a local versus global semigroups result, which has yet to be fully explored, for example, to establish sufficient conditions for blowup of solutions to parabolic equations.
Over his entire mathematical career, John enjoyed applying his skills and validating his ideas by working on applications found in industry and research laboratories. Starting with a short stint as a Nuclear Engineer at General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas in the late 1950's, his consulting and summer work consumed almost every summer and more than a few academic semesters. He consulted for Oak Ridge National Laboratories from the early 1960's and into the 1980's, the Institute for Defense Analysis many times from the 1970's until after 2010, and spent several idyllic summers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was an interested and contributing partner at the tech start-up Data Vortex, owned by his long time friend and colleague Coke Reed (see https://www.datavortex.com/2021/01/20/john-w-neuberger-1934-2020/). John always found the endless source of new problems and the many new personal and mathematical friendships associated with the research and consulting activities outside of his academic duties to be an essential and delightful part of his professional life, and a bit of a patriotic duty.
John's short unpublished article entitled Academic Freedom contains many delightful pearls of wisdom. It is an insightful autobiographical account of his education, and a frank commentary on education in general.
John was an avid cyclist, an adventurous worldwide traveler, and had a great love for sharing a good meal and conversation with friends. He commuted to work by bicycle for many decades, and loved to combine travel for work with commuting on his hi-tech folding bike, such as the time he went tens of miles daily between home and work along the hilly coasts of La Jolla California. After a pleasant visit to Alaska on the longest day of the year, he insisted on revisiting on the shortest day of the year to a one room cabin with no running water and a wood burning stove, forty below zero, family in tow, to spend a perfectly white Christmas. Every evening at every conference was an opportunity for him to organize a dinner with some group of old friends and new acquaintances, usually with him insisting on having the privilege to pay the tab.
John's contributions to mathematics, his magnetic personality, and his positive effect on others make him irreplaceable. We miss him sorely.
Special Issue Editors
Alfonso Castro
Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College
Claremont CA 91711, USA
email: castro@g.hmc.edu
Maya Chhetri
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greenboro, N.C. 27402
email: m_chhetr@uncg.edu
Petr Girg
Department of Mathematics,
Faculty of Applied Sciences
University of West Bohemia
Univerzitni 8, 30100 Plzen, Czech Republic
email: pgirg@kma.zcu.cz
John M. Neuberger
Department of Mathematics
Northern Arizona University, 86005
Flagstaff, AZ 86011, USA
email: John.Neuberger@nau.edu
Go to the Special Issues: Electron. J. Diff. Eqns.