Jose Fernando "Chepe" Escobar

Obituary
JOSE FERNANDO "CHEPE" ESCOBAR
Farewell to a great man and mathematician
José Fernando "Chepe" Escobar, 49, passed away on January 3, 2004, in Colombia after a short illness. Chepe was born in Manizales, Colombia, on December 20, 1954. He was educated in Colombia, Brazil, and the US, obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. As a young person in Colombia, he was a competitive diver and won multiple national and international championships. He had his first bout with cancer while he was in graduate school, and despite a hopeless diagnosis from his doctors he was able to recover completely. This experience helped shape his personality, making him a man of great strength, compassion, and optimism.The youngest child of Gustavo Escobar and Yadira Velázquez, he is survived by his siblings Maria Victoria (a resident of Colombia) and Arturo Escobar (a professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)."He's a drop-dead salsa dancer, plays soccer three times a week, enjoys fine wines, and he's known for preparing an outstanding sancocho de cola (a typical Colombian stew)." That's how friends and family describe José F. Escobar. Still, it was not because of his cheerful and easy-going personality that "Chepe," as his friends called him, joined the ranks of scientific elites. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, a world-renowned expert in the field of Differential Geometry that studies geometric problems using methods of differential equations.The Academic. Escobar joined the faculty at Cornell on July 1, 1994. Before working at Cornell, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and Associate Professor at Indiana University. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, IMPA (Brazil), the Courant Institute of New York University, Warwick University (England), the Mittag Leffler Institute (Sweden), and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientif-iques, IHES (France), among others.Member of the National Science Foundation and the Academia Colombiana de las Ciencias (Colom-bia), Professor Escobar was awarded numerous fellowships and academic distinctions for his research, including an Alfred P. Sloan Disserta-tion Fellowship, 1985-86, and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, 1992-97. For his intellectual contributions, he also received a doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad del Valle (Colombia), where he was often Visiting Professor.Greatest Honor. In 1992, Professor Escobar received the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from President George Bush Sr. This award, created by the White House in conjunction with The National Science Foundation, honors young and exceptionally talented professors with $100,000 annually for five years, for the development of their research. Professor Escobar received the prize for his research in geometry and differential equations, and especially for his work in relation to the theoretical bases of modern physics and the dynamics of the universe.In the Department of Mathematics at Cornell, "Chepe" was a thesis advisor to many graduate students and a mentor to several postdoctoral associates. He was also deeply involved in encouraging mathematical development in South American countries and helped the Mathematics Department recruit many graduate students from that part of the world. Today, many of the students supported with Professor Escobar's award money are now Ph.D.'s who practice in the field of mathematics in the US and abroad. Of special mention are Nelson Castañeda, Professor at Central Connecticut State University, Gonzalo García, Professor at the Universidad del Valle (Colombia), Henrique Araujo at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil), and Fernando Coda Márques, Professor at IMPA (Brazil).In May 2004, two of Professor Escobar's students, Nelia Charalambous (from Cyprus) and Gian Carlos Cortissoz (from Colombia), will receive their Ph.D. degrees, while another, Fernando Schwartz (from Chile), is expected to finish his Ph.D. in 2005.The scientist not only financially supported students with money from the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award. He also organized and funded, starting in 1993, various summer workshops in Colombia, with the participation of well-known figures of advanced mathematics. Professor Escobar's dream was to create an institute for advanced mathematics in Colombia, where Colombian and other Latin American scientists could work comfortably, dedicating themselves exclusively to research. For Professor Escobar, bringing Colombian scientists back to their country was a utopian vision. Still, he thought that it was possible to involve them in projects such as the summer workshops and an institute for advanced mathematics, initiatives that he considered essential for the advancement of science and technology in his native country. Regrettably, his death has brought those plans to an end.There will be a memorial service on Monday, Feb. 16 at Anabel Taylor Hall, Cornell University. The service starts at 4p.m. in the Chapel followed by a reception in the One World room.