RIP Paul Steen (?? – 2020)

I received the sad news early today that Cornell Professor Paul Steen died on Friday.

I took a class on bifurcation theory from Paul, who was very supportive. My class project, in which I needed to use AUTO (an important aspect of the course), led to this publication.

Here is an excerpt from the Acknowledgements section:

Additionally, we express our gratitude toward Alan Champneys for several productive suggestions regarding the numerics, Alejandro Rodríguez-Luis for providing a preprint of his manuscript, and Paul Steen, whose guidance for this work as a project for ChE 753 (on which this paper is based) was particularly valuable.

Physics 11: A Special Caltech Class

I never applied to take Physics 11 at Caltech, though surely I would have loved it. It's certainly a course that I would love to teach, and I like to think that a lot of my research projects and our networks journal club (and study groups with industry and related things that we do) have a lot of this flavor. I certainly want them to.

Here is the lead in Caltech's Facebook post today about the course: "Among the classes a Caltech freshman can take, Physics 11 stands out. Those who make it through its series of intellectual hoops embark on a unique classroom experience with no set curriculum or exams and without strict adherence to any single scientific discipline—despite the course's name."