David Broomhead passed away on July 24th, 2014 after a long illness. David was a Professor of Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. I got to know him in 2004 when the Victoria University of Manchester merged with UMIST and the two mathematics departments, his at UMIST and mine at VUM, became one.
David was a truly interdisciplinary mathematician and led the CICADA (Centre for Interdisciplinary Computational and Dynamical Analysis) project (2007-2011), a £3M centre funded by the University of Manchester and EPSRC, which explored new mathematical and computational methods for analyzing hybrid systems and asynchronous systems and developed adaptive control methods for these systems. The centre involved academics from the Schools of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical and Electronic Engineering, along with four PhD students and six postdocs, all brought together by David’s inspirational leadership.
One of the legacies of CICADA is the burgeoning activity in Tropical Mathematics, which straddles the pure and applied mathematics groups in Manchester, and whose weekly seminars David managed to attend regularly until shortly before his death. Indeed one of David’s last papers is his Algebraic approach to time borrowing (2013), with Steve Furber and Marianne Johnson, which uses max-plus algebra to study an algorithmic approach to time borrowing in digital hardware.
Among the other things that David pioneered in the School, two stand out for me. First, he ran one of the EPSRC creativity workshop pilots in 2010 under the Creativity@Home banner, for the CICADA project team. The report from that workshop contains a limerick, which I remember David composing and reading out on the first morning:
One who works on Project CICADA
Has to be a conceptual trader
Who needs the theory of Morse
To tap into the Force –
A mathematically driven Darth Vader!
The workshop was influential in guiding the subsequent activities of CICADA and its success encouraged me to organize two further creativity workshops, for the numerical analysis group and for the EPSRC NA-HPC Network.
The second idea that David introduced to the School was the role of a technology translator. He had organized (with David Abrahams) a European Study Group with Industry in Manchester in 2005 and saw first-hand the important role played by technology translators in providing two-way communication between mathematicians and industry. David secured funding from the University’s EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account and combined this with CICADA funds to create a technology translator post in the School of Mathematics. That role was very successful and the holder (Dr Geoff Evatt) is now a permanent lecturer in the School.
I’ve touched on just a few of David’s many contributions. I am sure other tributes to David will appear, and I will try to keep a record at the end of this post.
Photo credits: Nick Higham (1), Dennis Sherwood (2).
Updates: Reminiscences and Obituaries
- Condolences page on School of Mathematics website.
- By Paul Glendinning.
- By Douglas Kell.
- By David Sumpter.
- By Kate Cooper.
- By Mark Muldoon in the London Mathematical Society Newsletter.
Nick Higham 