Gunduz Caginalp (died December 7th, 2021) was a Turkish-born American mathematician whose research has also contributed over 100 papers to physics, materials science and economics/finance journals, including two with Michael Fisher and nine with Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith. He began his studies at Cornell University in 1970 and received an AB in 1973 "Cum Laude with Honors in All Subjects" and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1976 he received a master's degree, and in 1978 a PhD, both also at Cornell. He held positions at The Rockefeller University, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh (since 1984), where he was a professor of Mathematics until his death on December 7, 2021. He was born in Turkey, and spent his first seven years and ages 13–16 there, and the middle years in New York City. Caginalp and his wife Eva were married in 1992 and had three sons, Carey, Reggie and Ryan. He served as the editor of the Journal of Behavioral Finance (1999–2003), and was an associate editor for numerous journals. He received awards from the National Science Foundation as well as private foundations.
Thesis and related research Caginalp's PhD in Applied Mathematics at Cornell University (with thesis advisor Professor Michael Fisher) focused on surface free energy. Previous results by David Ruelle, Fisher, and Elliot Lieb in the 1960s had established that the free energy of a large system can be written as a product of the volume times a term f ∞ {\displaystyle f_{\infty }} (free energy per unit volume) that is independent of the size of the system, plus smaller terms. A remaining problem was to prove that there was a similar term associated with the surface. This was more difficult since the f ∞ {\displaystyle f_{\infty }} proofs relied on discarding terms that were proportional to the surface. A key result of Caginalp's thesis [1,2,3] is the proof that the free energy, F, of a lattice system occupying a region Ω {\displaystyle \Omega } with volume | Ω | {\displaystyle |\Omega |} and surface area | ∂ Ω | {\displaystyle |\partial \Omega |} can be written as
F ( Ω ) = | Ω | f ∞ + | ∂ Ω | f x + . . . {\displaystyle F(\Omega )=|\Omega |f_{\infty }+|\partial \Omega |f_{x}+...}
with f x {\displaystyle f_{x}} is the surface free energy (independent of | Ω | {\displaystyle |\Omega |} and | ∂ Ω | {\displaystyle |\partial \Omega |} ). Shortly after his PhD, Caginalp joined the Mathematical Physics group of James Glimm (2002 National Medal of Science recipient) at The Rockefeller University. In addition to working on mathematical statistical mechanics, he also proved existence theorems on nonlinear hyperbolic differential equations describing fluid flow. These papers were published in the Annals of Physics and the Journal of Differential Equations.
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