Eliahu Levy (1947-2023)

I was shocked and saddened last week to hear that my friend and colleague Eliahu Levy passed away. Being a research mathematician, I have had the good fortune of meeting some very brilliant individuals (as some of us – not so many, actually – are), and I was also honored to have collaborated with some of these geniuses. It is with this perspective that I say, that Eliahu Levy may very well be one of the smartest people that I met in my life, the purest of the pure mathematicians.

Eliahu

Janos Aczel (1924-2020)

I was saddened to find out that Janos Aczel passed away earlier this month. In my early days, after Boris Paneah got me hooked on functional equations, Aczel’s books caught my eye. Since then I am a fan of his. In particular, I was drawn by a small booklet by him whose title I am not able to reconstruct, and his two larger books “Lectures on Functional Equations and Their Applications” (1966) and “Functional Equations in Several Variables” (1987, co-authored with, Dhombres), which for a couple of years were to me among the most interesting and useful books I knew.

I have two stories two tell about Janos.

Boris Paneah (1936-2019)

Last Thursday (10.10.2019) my beloved teacher and master’s thesis advisor Boris Paneah passed away. Boris was a great mathematician who worked most of his career on PDEs and harmonic analysis. In the last decade of his mathematical activity, he founded a new direction in the theory of functional equations, using dynamical methods. His publications can be found on his homepage. For me, he was most of all a very special teacher. In fact, he played an important role in my decision to continue to graduate studies. I want to share here an obituary that I wrote for him (it is in Hebrew).

Ronald G. Douglas (1938-2018)

A couple of weeks ago I learned from an American colleague that Ron Douglas passed away. This loss saddens me very much. Ron Douglas was a leader in the Operator Theory community, an inspiring mathematician, a person of the kind that they don’t make like any more.

The first time that I met him was in the summer of 2009,