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Obituary: Zeev Schuss

By Amit Singer and David Holcman

Zeev Schuss, professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Tel Aviv University (TAU), passed away on July 29, 2018. Zeev was born in Poland in 1937. He graduated from the Tel Aviv Academy of Music in 1963 with a degree in composition, conducting, and theory, and earned a degree in mathematics two years later. Zeev received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1970, working with Avner Friedman on classical analysis of partial differential equations (PDEs). He went on to become a professor at TAU and chaired the Department of Applied Mathematics from 1993 to 1995. 

During the course of his career, Zeev published over 200 papers in pure and applied math, chemistry, physics, engineering, and biology. He also wrote six books in applied mathematics, published by Springer and Wiley. He supervised dozens of M.Sc. and Ph.D. students in the aforementioned disciplines, many of whom hold positions at prestigious institutions around the world.

Zeev Schuss (1937-2018). He is pictured here with Bob Eisenberg’s granddaughter. Image courtesy of Bob Eisenberg.
It took time for Zeev to define the meaning of applied mathematics for himself. After attaining his Ph.D., he decided to move in a more applied direction. The starting point was a class that he took with Henry McKean about stochastic processes and the asymptotics of differential equations that McKean had developed with Bernard Matkowsky. Zeev then discovered Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar’s 1943 review of thermal activation escape from an attractor. He was able to obtain a formal asymptotic formula as a solution to the exit problem in  dimensions. News of this work spread following a talk Zeev delivered at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in the 1970s. Although his result was not considered mathematically rigorous, Zeev recognized its newness and proceeded in this direction for the next 40 years. It was this type of mathematics that he wanted to develop and apply to the sciences, engineering, technology, etc. Rather than discover formal proofs, he aimed to define and accurately execute new computations, as well as find new physical mechanisms through modeling and novel explanations from calculations.

Closed formulas, obtained by asymptotic approximation to solutions of PDEs, are among the most robust and efficient tools for uncovering physical laws. These formulas deal precisely with manipulation of infinities and are thus very relevant in understanding the studied systems’ refined properties. Zeev made several significant contributions by applying asymptotics to rare events, such as thermally activated escape from an attractor in physics and chemistry, and loss of lock in signal tracking.

With his collaborators, friends, and students, Zeev developed new tools to analyze data about selectivity of ionic channels (the selection of ions in a channel pore that is only a few atomic diameters in size). Another of his innovations was the narrow escape theory (escape of a stochastic particle from a narrow window), which inspired many scientific communities of applied mathematicians, physicists, biophysicists, and computational biologists, in addition to the fourth episode of the television series Fargo. Zeev continued to work through retirement, authoring five of his six books during this time.

Throughout his life, Zeev demonstrated that there are no standard academic paths for a career in applied mathematics. This is a lesson for all scholars: do what you like, because nobody knows where the next revolution in applied mathematics lies.

Amit Singer is a professor of mathematics in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. David Holcman is Director of Research at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France and a fellow of Churchill College in Cambridge, U.K.

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