In Memoriam: Peter Smereka

UCLA mathematics mourns the sudden untimely death of a colleague and friend, Peter Smereka.  Peter was 56 years old and a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan since 1994.  He received his PhD from UCSB and spent three years at UCLA (1991-1994) as a postdoc, with Stan Osher and Russ Caflisch as his advisors.  Peter worked on a wide variety of problems, ranging from fluid dynamics to materials science, and was considered one of the leading applied and computational mathematicians of his generation.