I was sorry to hear last week that Bob Dewar passed away while on a sabbatical at Cambridge. There are some tributes on the ANU MSI website, where he was an Emeritus Professor and still remained active in research.
Bob was my supervisor for a summer research project I undertook in 2009, at the end of my second year of undergraduate studies. At this time I was still unsure whether I would do a theoretical or experimental project if embarking on a PhD, let alone what topic it would be in, and this was my first experience of a research project in theoretical physics.
On my first day, Bob handed me an ancient monograph - his MSc thesis from 1967! - and assigned me the problem of getting some old Fortran code from the appendix working on a modern system. The code was designed to efficiently evaluate the wake potential left by a charged particle moving through a plasma by making use of clever analytical tricks and special function identities. Code efficiency was vital in that era, when programs were written on punched cards and the whole university had to share time on a single computer! Nowadays with easy access to computer algebra systems we are lazier and the art of special functions and asymptotic expansions is less widely appreciated. It was a fun little project for the summer, capped off with the opportunity to present the work at the Gaseous Electronics Meeting, held near Bateman's Bay that year. Later we (well, mostly Bob) wrote a paper out of this project. Whenever I see the wake left by a boat or swimming duck I am reminded of this work.
Bob was an inspiring mentor, representative of a kinder, more humble era of science where there was the freedom to follow a passion and spend decades digging into a single area of expertise throughout one's career and into retirement.
