Prof. Kurt Georg passed away suddenly on February 14, at his home in Fort Collins, Colorado on the eve of his 61-st birthday. He was a numerical analyst and a leading exponent of numerical continuation methods. He was a cherished friend, colleague, teacher, husband, and father.
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, he received his PhD from the Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Bonn under the direction of Prof. Heinz Unger in 1968. He was continuously employed at the University of Bonn from 1965 until 1986, being a member of the Sonderforschungsbereich 72 (SFB 72) from its inception, and completing his Habilitation there. In 1986, he became a member of the Mathematics Department of Colorado State University, where he remained until his death.
Kurt was a Visiting Professor at a number of universities including the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the universities of Florence, Trieste, Cosenza, Prague, Bari, Trier, Novi Sad, Bremen, Corvallis, Rome and Tsukuba. Among the listeners at his lectures in Florence was the young mathematician, Anna Maria Cundari, whom he married in 1975, in her home town, Paola, in southern Italy. Neither Anna Maria nor Kurt was fluent in the language of the other and so their courtship was quite naturally conducted in the romantic language: French. Subsequently, they and their children would speak Italian, German, and English at home.
Kurt's early work dealt with functional analysis, nonlinear operators and fixed point theorems.
One of his oft-cited papers concerned an inverse iteration method for nonlinear
maps. In 1977, the first author
met Kurt in Bonn at the SFB 72 in Bonn where we began a friendship and
collaboration which lasted to the present day. One of our early joint publications was a
survey article on numerical continuation methods appearing in SIAM Review in 1980. This led in
turn to the monograph, ``Numerical Continuation Methods," published by Springer Verlag in 1990 and
several additional lengthy surveys on the subject. The monograph is scheduled to be re-released
in the SIAM Series,
Classics in Applied Mathematics. In the 1990's Kurt worked extensively on
exploiting symmetry in various topics of numerical analysis. One of these topics concerned
boundary integral methods. In the late 90's he developed efficient cellular exclusion algorithms
for computing all real roots or global minima of general classes of maps in an
Kurt Georg had a love and a gift for mathematical discussion. He had an elegant, clear, and polished mathematical style for writing and blackboard presentation. Kurt was a dedicated and esteemed teacher on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Prior to the advent of such technology based educational devices such as Web-CT, he had developed and used similar programs for automatic homework submission. He mentored and co-mentored over a dozen graduate students, and recently he served as the director of the mathematics graduate program at Colorado State University.
Kurt Georg maintained very close ties to relatives and colleagues in Italy. He and his family made many visits there. He was scheduled to spend a sabbatical at the University of Cosenza this fall. He was a talented and avid singer of classical music. He was a cantor in his Catholic church, and a tenor in his church choir and the Fort Collins Larimer Chorale. In recent years he took particular pleasure in singing together with his sons.
Kurt Georg is survived by his wife, Anna Maria, three sons, Klaus, Manfred, and Francesco, and his sister Beate Speckmann. He also leaves behind many colleagues and friends who will miss him for his generous, modest, and caring nature, and his sense of humor.
A scholarship fund for Colorado State University students has been created by his family. Donations to the fund may be made via the address:
Gene Allgower and Heinz-Otto Peitgen, 2003-02-27