Soliton Obituaries Home Page
Follow the links to get more obituaries, photographs, etc. Please
inform me of other possible entries for these pages.
One of the pioneers and champions of nonlinear science, Martin Kruskal
died on Dec 26, 2006. He was famous for many things, but those in the
nonlinear community will remember him best as the modern discoverer of
the soliton, along with Norman Zabusky. Their pioneering paper (PRL
15, 240, 1965) and other later works opened up the whole area
of integrable systems. His Wikipedia
page gives many more details, the link above concentrates on his
association with Scotland.
One of the pioneers and popularizers of nonlinear science, Alwyn Scott
died on Jan 11, 2007. Together with Chu and McLaughlin, he wrote the
first review on soliton theory (Proc. IEEE, 61, 1443, 1973),
which provided many researchers with their first introduction to the
field. He also alerted the modern world to the then forgotten first
observation of the solitary wave by John Scott Russell in 1834. Scott
and McLauglin also pioneered the use of perturbation theory in
treating near-integrable models (PRA 18, 1652, 1978). More
recently Scott championed the idea of the importance of soliton-like
localized processes on biological macromolecules, in particular the
Davydon soliton. Throughout his life Scott published not just
numerous scientific papers, but many books on nonlinear waves,
neurophysics, and conciousness studies. Most recently he undertook
the mammoth task of editing the Encyclopedia
of Nonlinear Science. He was working on the final pages of a
history of Nonlinear Science when he died,
The Nonlinear Universe. See the link above for some photos of his
association with Scotland.
Robin Bullough
Robin Bullough of the University of Manchester, died on August 30th
2008, aged 78. He was an early and enthusiastic proponent of soliton
research in optics and other fields, giving many invited talks at
meetings in the UK and elsewhere. His group made significant
contributions to early work in optical solitons, and together with
Phillip Caudrey he was the editor of one of the first books on
solitons: "Solitons", Springer-Verlag, Berlin and New York, 1980,
(Topics in Current Physics, 17). He also wrote a scholarly article on
the early history of the solitary wave in fluid mechanics, "The Wave"
"par excellence", the solitary, progressive great wave of equilibrium
of the fluid - an early history of the solitary wave', in Solitons,
ed. M Lakshmanan, Springer Series in Nonlinear Dynamics, 1988,
150-281. He was active until his death in a number of soliton-related
areas such as quantum solitons, quantum electrodynamics, and
Bose-Einstein condensates.
Chris Eilbeck/Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh/
J.C.Eilbeck@hw.ac.uk