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Obituary: H. Thomas Banks

By William J. Browning

H. Thomas Banks, 1940-2019. Photo courtesy of Sue Banks.
On December 31, 2019, the applied mathematics community lost a prolific researcher, valued collaborator, and thoughtful mentor when Harvey Thomas Banks passed away after a short illness. He was 79 years old. During his long research and teaching career at Brown University, the University of Southern California (USC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU), Tom made seminal contributions in scientific computing with applications in control and estimation; modeling and control in biomedical systems; smart materials; inverse problems; semi-group theory; and electromagnetic material interrogation. He authored more than 550 peer-reviewed publications and five research monographs. Tom is remembered as an effective teacher and mentor who supervised 51 Ph.D. theses and 40 postdoctoral associates. He was also an outstanding contributor to the applied mathematics community.

Tom was born in Hickory, N.C. on October 30, 1940, and raised in rural North Carolina’s Catawba County. He was the oldest of four children of John Henry and Esther Bernetta Banks. Tom graduated from NCSU in 1963 with a B.S. in applied mathematics before attending graduate school at Purdue University, where he earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1967. He studied under the guidance of L.D. Berkovitz and wrote his dissertation on control of differential equation systems with delays.

After graduation, Tom joined the Division of Applied Mathematics and the Center for Dynamical Systems at Brown. Solomon Lefschetz had recently founded the latter, which was renowned worldwide for its work in dynamical systems, control theory, and their applications. While at Brown, Tom was influenced by world-class applied mathematicians including Lefschetz, J.P. LaSalle, Wendell Fleming, Jack Hale, and Harold Kushner. He also greatly benefited from the influence of outstanding contemporaries such as Constantine Dafermos, E.F. (Jim) Infante, Marc Jacobs, and Dick Miller. Tom remained at Brown until 1989.

From 1969 to 1972, Tom served as director of Brown’s Graduate Program in Applied Mathematics, which led to an early and lifelong interest in mentoring and working with graduate students and postdocs. Though he had a well-deserved reputation as a great teacher at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Tom occasionally showed limited patience with slackers among his students; this is unsurprising, considering his own amazingly strong work ethic.

In 1970, Tom had the opportunity to work with medical researchers at Rhode Island Hospital on the modeling of glucose homeostasis, which provided a new research direction for him. This stimulated a career-long dedication to teaching and research in biological areas. In the early 1970s, Tom co-taught courses in physiology at Brown’s medical school, developed a joint applied mathematics/biomedical sciences program at Brown, and devoted significant research energy to topics in biology, such as enzyme kinetics, physiological control systems, and enzyme cascades in biochemical pathways.

In 1971, Jacques-Louis Lions invited Tom to spend a month at Inria and lecture on biomedical applications of control and identification. These lectures inspired a long and fruitful collaboration with numerous French applied mathematicians, including Jean Pierre Kernevez, Guy Chavent, and Doina Cioranescu, among others. During this first visit, Banks met Kernevez and Daniel Thomas and became involved with some of their research on the modeling of active transport in biological membranes. This led to an honorary faculty position at Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) and multiple exchange visits between the groups at Brown and UTC. The visits to France occasioned many research encounters with other mathematicians and scientists, and subsequent visiting faculty appointments for Tom at Université Paris-Dauphine (1988), Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris VI and Collège de France (1994), Université de Franche-Comté (1996), and Centre Emile Borel, Institut Henri Poincaré (1998).

Tom’s work in the biological sciences resulted in research contributions to a wide variety of topics, including reaction-diffusion in membranes; protein synthesis; enzyme-regulated pathways in glycogenolysis; insect population growth and dispersal; size-structured models in fish populations; transport in brain tissue; physiologically-based pharmacodynamics kinetic models of toxic agents in animals; detection of coronary stenosis via propagating waves in viscoelastic tissue; and electromagnetic interrogation in tissue by means of natural and/or acoustically generated electrical interfaces.

In 1974, Tom met Franz Kappel in Würzburg, Germany. They quickly became good friends and professional colleagues, initiating a lengthy research collaboration when Kappel and his family visited Brown later that same year. The pair initially focused their joint efforts on approximation methods for delay systems, but subsequent collaboration included semigroup methods for inverse problems — especially those involving size-structured population models for fish populations. An important benefit of their association was exchange visits for many young mathematicians in the research centers at Brown/USC/NCSU and the University of Graz.

In 1980, Milt Rose, director of the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE) at NASA’s Langley Research Center, asked Tom to help develop and direct an ICASE program in control theory to provide basic mathematical and computational research for NASA-related scientific and engineering questions. In addition to recruiting and mentoring many excellent postdocs for the program, Tom developed numerous collaborations with NASA engineers. These partnerships significantly affected the directions of his own research, as well as that of his students and postdocs.

At the time of his ICASE involvement, Tom began a series of interactions with scientists and engineers at air force laboratories that stimulated his research interests in a number of topics, including large flexible space structures and smart material structures. These interactions—and in some cases joint experimental efforts—included groups at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB), Kirkland AFB, and Elgin AFB. The most significant of these communications resulted in a project with a group at Brooks Air Force Base, led by Richard Albanese. Tom met Albanese in the early 1990s and enjoyed a substantial and almost immediate scientific rapport, which promoted intense activities in electromagnetics and the health sciences for Tom and his graduate students.

Another important influence in the 1980s originated from a chance meeting between Tom and Daniel J. Inman at a workshop on control of flexible structures that was sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Their friendship generated significant collaborative efforts in control and identification, particularly in vibration-based damage detection methods for smart material structures (especially those involving piezoceramic actuators and sensors). Tom and Inman's research collaborations began in earnest in 1986, while Inman was at the State University of New York at Buffalo through an Air Force Office of Scientific Research University Research Initiative on control and damping of flexible structures.

Many of these engineering collaborations with NASA and air force laboratory scientists—and with Inman and his students and colleagues—were manifestations of Tom's deep interest in the physical sciences, which began during his undergraduate days when he pursued strong minor programs in physics and mechanics. Subsequent research efforts involved contributions in mechanical systems (e.g., beams, plates, and articulated and hybrid flexible structures), damping in elastic and viscoelastic structures (including rubber and human tissue), acoustics (particularly seismic inverse problems and noise suppression), and fluid/structure interactions.

In 1989, Tom moved to Manhattan Beach, Calif., and established the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences, a research institution in applied mathematics at USC. He became the center’s first director. Three years later, Tom joined the faculty of NCSU as University Professor and Drexel Professor of Mathematics. He made a number of important institutional contributions at NCSU, in addition to pursuing a prolific career in both research and education. For example, Tom resuscitated the Center for Research in Scientific Computation (CRSC) and founded the internationally recognized Industrial Applied Mathematics Program (IAMP), which specializes in research projects and graduate/postdoctoral training with industries and government laboratories.

Lessons learned from IAMP prompted Tom to work with Marie Davidian, a statistician at NCSU, to propose and co-lead efforts in the foundation of a new Center for Quantitative Sciences in Biomedicine (CQSB), which opened in July 2007. The CQSB catalyzes and facilitates project-oriented research in the biomedical sciences — where success requires integrated collaborations between scientists in the quantitative and biological disciplines. It also provides a framework for such research to take place, as well as a basis for graduate and postgraduate training at the interface of the quantitative and biomedical sciences.

Tom was one of the four founding directorate members of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) in North Carolina. He was instrumental in preparing the proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) between 2000 and 2002 and even came up with the name for SAMSI. Tom served on the directorate from 2002 to 2005, leading the effort in applied mathematics as well as education and outreach. He developed the SAMSI Education and Outreach (E&O) Program to foster participation of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in joint statistical/mathematical research projects. This program has become the model for similar E&O programs at other institutes of the NSF.

Throughout his lengthy research career, Tom retained a sharp eye for identifying emerging application areas to which he then made substantial contributions. He always worked quickly and accurately, thus attracting many like-minded collaborators from a wide variety of engineering and scientific disciplines.

Service to the profession was important to Tom. For example, he gave numerous four-day short courses on mathematical modeling in the life sciences for faculty in the NSF-AAAS Chautauqua Lecture Series during the 1970s. Tom was elected to the SIAM Board of Trustees and served as chair of the board. He also held multiple service positions at SIAM, including on the editorial board of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization; Tom was the managing editor from 1979 to 1981 and 1986 to 1988. In addition, he was the Vice President for Publications and acted as founding editor and editor-in-chief of the SIAM book series on Frontiers in Applied Mathematics.

Tom gave substantial energy to other journals and was a member of numerous editorial boards, including the Quarterly of Applied Mathematics; Journal of Mathematical Biology; Mathematical and Computer Modelling; Computational and Applied Mathematics; and Journal of Inverse and Ill-posed Problems; Inverse Problems; and Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures. He served as director of several research centers, including the Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems, Brown's Center for Control Sciences, and the CRSC at NCSU.

Tom received numerous honors for his research and service. These accolades include SIAM’s W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize, NCSU’s Distinguished Scholarship Achievement Award and Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award, Purdue’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Control Systems Society Control Systems Technology Award. He was also an elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the IEEE, as well as an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor at NCSU and Professeur Honoraire at Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Students, postdoctoral researchers, and colleagues were extremely significant in Tom’s life, but his wife Sue was the most important part of his professional and personal endeavors. It was her efforts that led many of the students, postdocs, and visitors to become members of the Banks’ extended family.

Tom is survived by his wife Sue, son John, daughter Jennifer, and grandchildren Samantha and Emilie. His legacy is the generations of applied mathematicians he trained in the art and practice of mathematics application. Tom was admired and respected by all who knew him for his kindness, collegiality, generosity, and strong work ethic, and is sorely missed by family, students, colleagues, and friends.


Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank Wendell Fleming of Brown University for his valuable assistance in putting this tribute together.

William J. Browning is the CEO and founder of Applied Mathematics, Inc. He studied under L.D. Berkovitz at Purdue University and collaborated with Tom Banks on research projects for many years.

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