Zeev Schuss
Zeev Schuss (1937-2018) was born in Poland 1937, graduated in composition, conducting, and theory from the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv 1963, graduated in mathematics 1965 and got his PhD in mathematics from Northwestern 1970 under the supervision of Avner Friedman. He became professor at Tel Aviv University and served the chairman of applied mathematics 1993-1995. He published over 200 papers in pure and applied math, chemistry, physics, engineering, and biology. He wrote 6 books on applied math, published by Springer and Wiley. He contributed to the Narrow escape problem
He supervised tens of MSc and PhD students in the above disciplines; quite a few of them hold positions in prestigious institutions across the world (Israel, USA, Europe, and China). Schuss was an editor of SIAP during 90-95. He supervised tens of MSc and PhD students in the above disciplines; quite a few of them hold positions in prestigious institutions across the world (Israel, USA, Europe, and China).
A vision of what is applied mathematics
Zeev Scuss usually preferred to provide context rather than formal proofs, and to explain science in the tradition that goes back probably to Galileo. To the question what applied mathematics is? he used to say that it is mathematics developed and applied to the sciences, engineering and more. Its purpose is to analyze, compute, simulate or discover new features and therefore its goal is to discover, not necessarily formal proof, but to find new mechanisms through modeling, new explanations from computations, and more important, to define the new computations needed and to carry them out as accurately as possible. One of the most robust and efficient tools for finding physical laws are closed formulas, obtained by the method of asymptotic approximation to solutions of partial differential equations. These formulas are particularly valuable for resolving singular behavior, where practically infinite computer time is needed to explore a modest fraction of the parameter space. Designing fast and efficient numerical simulations is also a key to success. In this context, finding a proof is not the most urgent mission.
Zeev schuss developed asymptotic approaches to PDEs
Asymptotic approaches has been used successfully more than once, by Poincare for studying divergent series or by Ramanujan in summation of series in number theory or by Chandrasekar in many statistical physics problems. Zeev Schuss made several times contributions in applying asymptotics of rare events, such as thermally activated escape from an attractor in physics, chemistry, and in loss of lock in signal tracking. Another innovation is the formula for the narrow escape time in molecular and cellular biophysics.
Early career
It took time for Zeev schuss to define for himself what applied mathematics means [15]. After his PhD, he realized that he had to stop proving existence, uniqueness of PDEs and all exercises of finding lower and upper estimates. After his PhD with A. Friedman, he move orthogonally to the ambient orthodoxy. The starting point was a class that he took from Henry McKean about stochastic processes and the asymptotics of differential equations that he developed in discussions with B. Matkowsky.
Then he discovered the review (published in 1943) of Chandrasekar in the Review of Modern Physics about thermal activation escape from an attractor. He was able to obtain a formal asymptotic formula as a solution of the exit problem in n dimensions. After he gave a talk at the Courant Institute in the 70s, the news spread at the speed of light across the USA [15]. Although not considered as a true mathematical result by the radicals and purists, Zeev schuss understood that this was a new result that nobody could get before and carried in that direction full speed for the next 40 years. It was the mathematics that he wanted to develop and apply to the sciences, engineering, technology and more. His purpose was to analyze, compute, simulate and discover new features, like experimentalists make discovery by looking under the microscope, except that for him, mathematics played the role of the microscope. The goal of applied mathematics for Zeev was to discover, not formal proofs, but to find new physical mechanisms through modeling, new explanations from computations, and to define the new computations needed and to carry them out as accurately as possible.
One of the most robust and efficient tools for finding physical laws are closed formulas, obtained by the method of asymptotic approximation to solutions of PDEs, although the initial formulation is often stochastic processes, probability, statistical physics, chemistry or mechanics. These formulas are particularly valuable for resolving singular behavior, where practically infinite computer time is needed to explore a modest fraction of the parameter space. Such formulas deal precisely with manipulating infinities and are thus very relevant in understanding the refined properties of the studied systems [1-6].
Designing fast and efficient simulations is also a key to success [3]. In this context, finding a proof is not the most urgent mission and is certainly not the goal. Asymptotic approaches have been used successfully more than once, by Poincare for studying divergent series or by Ramanujan in summation of series in number theory or by Chandrasekar in many statistical physics problems. Zeev made several significant contributions applying asymptotics to rare events, such as thermally activated escape from an attractor in physics, chemistry, and in loss of lock in signal tracking [1-3]. Another innovation is the formula for the narrow escape time in molecular and cellular biophysics [4-6].
A large portion of Zeev’s intellectual activity was dedicated to Applied Mathematics of science and engineering, to design stochastic simulations, to analyze stochastic processes, and to develop mathematical biophysics and theoretical biology. In that context, Zeev schuss developed with his collaborators, friends and students new tools to analyze data about selectivity of ionic channels (how ions are selected in a channel pore, the size of which can be just a few atomic diameters) and to develop the narrow escape theory (escape of a stochastic particle from a narrow window), that inspired many scientific communities of physics, biophysics, computational biology but also the fourth episode of the TV Fargo Series [16].
Zeev Schuss was a Teheran children
In 2017 in Akko we organized a symposium, where we illustrated the unexpected path of Zeev, paved with obstacles, but also opportunities of the developing sciences by using the geographical journey of the Teheran children [12-15], where Zeev participated both as the youngest child, but also as a defender in a trial that lasted 10 years. To establish the historical truth about ultimately what we call in modern history, the price of being a victim, Zeev decided to participate as a witness, but not as a direct participant in the trial. He said that the demands for repair were nothing: can few tens of thousands shekel compensate for an education that the children never received that impacted their entire life? The money that was supposed to serve this cause, was hijacked and used for something else: to build roads, public services, etc…. During such a too long trial, many of the survivors died, but the truth came up.
Briefly [12], the Tehran Children is the story of Jewish children orphan that escaped from Poland to Russia after Germany conquered it in September 1939 with a journey of 4 years, finally arriving in Palestine in 1943. In 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, 300,000 refugees, including Jews, poles, children, etc., were moving east. In 1940, they were sent to gulags in Siberia in cattle cars. The deportees lived under very difficult conditions, where many of the children died or became orphans in this period. Following the attack on the U.S.S.R by Germany, a new era started for the refugees, where they were released from gulags, and emigrated towards the Asian territories (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan). In 1941, after General Wladyslaw Andres was released from a Russian prison, the Soviet authorities agreed to allow 24,000 Polish citizens to move with the Andres army, including around 1000 Jewish children. 25,000 Polish soldiers were sent to Iran, to strengthen the British armies in the Middle East. Thirty-three thousand soldiers left, 11,000 citizens, 3,000 children, of which about 1,000 were orphaned Jewish children. In January 1943, the children moved to Afhaz and then to the Iranian port of Bender Shapur, where they embarked on the S.S. Dunera, headed to Karachi. From Karachi they embarked on another ship, the Neurolia, which sailed to Suez, Egypt. Then they crossed the Sinai Desert by train, and finally after an odyssey of four years of agony, they arrived in Atlit in Israel (Palestine at that time), on February 18th, 1943.
The Jewish agency distributed the children upon their arrival and Zeev Schuss was sent to a kibbutz. Finally, his mother found him and brought him back to Poland, where he could get an education, in contrast with the other kids that stayed in Israel. After the war was over, under the pressure of the USA, West Germany had to pay Israel for the costs of "resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees" and to compensate individuals [13].
However, the Teheran children did not receive any compensation and the money that was supposed to help them was used for other purposes. After retirement, many of the Teheran children understood that something went wrong in the process of compensation and started to investigate, until they realized that they were once again victims. In 2006-2007, a group of retired Teheran children initiated a prosecution against the state of Israel, but not much was achieved until Schuss discovered the strategic mistake: after a historian was called upon by the court to give his testimony about the historical context, Zeev found the turning argument: he discovered that “individual compensation” had been mis-translated into “collective compensation”. Obviously, this was a deliberated political maneuver to hijack money. This argument affected the defense severely to the point that the judge understood that the money was not intended to build roads but to resettle the refugees, because you do not resettle people on roads, but in houses. More examples were given, and the judge decided to give immediate compensation to the Teheran children. The Appeal came, and the State won and then it went to the supreme court, which confirmed the Appeal. This decision was merely intended to defend the interest of the state: Nobody can attack the State and certainly not victims, especially during the Ben Gurion time. But the State did not ask that the money given to the Teheran children should be returned, proving in a way that the children were right. Zeev fought all the time to get rid of the victim thinking, as he explained in a talk given at Yad Vashem.
Topics covered by Schuss’ scientific activity
Noise activation over potential barriers, Atomic migration in crystals, Fast electrons in LASER plasma physics, Lubrication in narrow bearings, Eigenvalues of the FPO in potential fields, Mean lifetime of the metastable state in the Josephson junction -Loss of lock in nonlinear filtering -Asymptotics of master equations -Stability of large communication networks,Noise in multi-stable systems,Reliability of elastic structures driven by random loads, Large deviations for Markov jump processes,Schrödinger's equation on a lattice with weak disorder -Ionic channels in biological membranes -Loss of lock in RADAR tracking with jamming and manoeuvering, Feynman integrals and absorption in quantum measurements -Ionic simulation in a continuum -NMR microscopy -Molecular and cellular biology.
References
1-Schuss, Zeev. Theory and Applications of Stochastic Differential Equations (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics - Applied Probability and Statistics Section), 1980.
3-Schuss, Zeev. Brownian dynamics at boundaries and interfaces. Springer-Verlag New York, 2015.
5-Holcman, D., & Schuss, Z. (2015). Stochastic narrow escape in molecular and cellular biology. Analysis and Applications, Springer Verlag, NY.
6-Holcman, D., & Schuss, Z. (2018). Second-Order Elliptic Boundary Value Problems with a Small Leading Part. In Asymptotics of Elliptic and Parabolic PDEs (pp. 3-9). Springer, Cham.
References (general):
7-Talk: Experimentalist meets theoretician held in 2007 at the Weizmann Institute, org. D. Holcman E. Korkotian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4GTiPVOiI&t=1616s (minute 27)
8-Piano recital for conference: Experimentalist meets theoretician held in 2007 at the Weizmann Institute, org. D. Holcman E. Korkotian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taiHOlAIhDY
9-When regression of Europe into Middle Ages will happen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvLGGAep6gM
10-Interview with Zeev Schuss 2005 (Israel in the Middle east., Politics of Israeli Universities, Applied mathematics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmhshIrBXxk&t=1018s
11-Holcman, D., & Schuss, Z. , New mathematical physics needed for life sciences - Physics Today Physics Today 69, 1, 10 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3036
12-Teheran children: https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Tehran/teh000.html
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-the-tehran-children-reach-palestine-1.5308639
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/1.4946090
http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=858%20
13- Luxembourg Agreement: compensation of West Germany to Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between_Israel_and_West_Germany
14- Lawsuit of the Teheran children, https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Tehran-Children-survivors-win-suit-against-state
15-Z. Schuss, A carrier Summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xFZxeOweCI&t=104s
16-TV Fargo series: narrow escape problem http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/fargo/50276/fargo-season-3-episode-4-review-the-narrow-escape-problem
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