Transport Theory and Statistical Physics A Tribute to Professor Mike ...

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A Tribute to Professor Mike Williams on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday Published online: 04 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: (2007) A Tribute to Professor Mike Williams on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, Transport Theory and Statistical Physics, 36:1-3, 9-11, DOI: 10.1080/00411450701456519 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00411450701456519

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Transport Theory and Statistical Physics, 36:9–11, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 0041-1450 print/1532-2424 online DOI: 10.1080/00411450701456519

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A TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR MIKE WILLIAMS ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY

The organizers of the Nineteenth International Conference on Transport Theory felt that it would be most appropriate to honor Professor M. M. R. Williams on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and I have the privilege to write a few words about him for this special issue—which I do with much pleasure. This tribute is partially a personal account; hence, it is not fully complete, but it hopefully will do justice to Mike’s scientific productivity and reflect his significance to our community. I have known Mike since 1979, when I spent 11 months as an IAEA postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary College (QMC) in London, where he was a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. My PhD adviser, George Kosa´ly, suggested that I spend the fellowship at QMC with Mike as the 9

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I. Pa´zsit

host because Mike had been active in the field of random processes in nuclear reactors. He had published a book on that subject some time earlier, and since I had done my PhD in the same field, I felt that it would be a good idea to visit him during my fellowship. I understood soon that Mike had never gotten stuck within one area for long. By the time I arrived at QMC, he had already changed fields completely, and was working on the transport theory of radiation damage in solids, including some stochastic aspects—a subject on which he had already managed to produce numerous papers and review articles. He changed fields again afterwards, first to aerosol transport, and then to radionuclide transport in fractured rock. In the past few years he has produced a large number of high-quality papers on transport in stochastic media, among numerous other papers. Mike is one of the most original, creative, and prolific persons in the field of mathematical methods and applications in nuclear engineering and transport theory. He has authored about 300 papers and four books in these fields; his monographs are used as reference materials in all major nuclear engineering departments around the world. There must be several generations of reactor physicists who, like myself, have grown up reading Mike’s books. The significance of Mike’s contribution to our science as the editor of Annals of Nuclear Energy (and its predecessor) for nearly four decades, and formerly also as the editor of Progress in Nuclear Energy, must also be mentioned. Annals is one of the leading journals in nuclear engineering, with a strong focus on mathematics and computation. As an editor and also a frequent author, Mike has established and maintained the exceptionally high quality of this journal. For all the above, Mike enjoys a thorough and welldeserved appreciation on the part of the transport theory community and the whole nuclear engineering community, which has been expressed before also in the form of prizes and awards such as the American Nuclear Society’s Arthur Holly Compton Award and its Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist’s Award. On behalf of all my colleagues, I wish Mike many more years of creative activity and continued

Tribute to Professor Williams

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contributions and presence in our scientific field. Happy birthday, Mike! Imre Pa´zsit Professor, Chair, Reactor Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Nuclear Engineering, Go¨teborg, Sweden