Biography
Ferdinand Verhulst was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on September
3, 1939, three months
after his father died and a few hours after World War II started. In the
following five years,
the Netherlands were occupied by nazi Germany, during which from Amsterdam
around 100 000
people
died from various causes. With such an ominous beginning, life could only get
better, and it did.
After visiting school and higher education, he graduated in 1966 at the
University of
Amsterdam in astrophysics and mathematics; his graduate research was in
numerical analysis and
programming for celestial mechanics. In the same year, he started working at the mathematics
department of the Technological University of Delft, where he spent his time on
teaching,
research, management and politics. This period was also the beginning of his
interest in
engineering problems.
During these years, he lived with his wife and three kids near Delft in a
windmill, dating
from 1637.
Realising that getting back to basics, that is, doing research, was necessary,
he gave up his
permanent position and moved in 1971 to the department of mathematics of the
University of
Utrecht, where he became a PhD student of Wiktor Eckhaus. His PhD thesis
was defended in 1973
and was called ``Asymptotic Expansions in the Perturbed Two-body Problem''.
The expansion of applied mathematics at the University of Utrecht, again
provided him with a
permanent position; he became Senior Lecturer of Mathematics in 1974 and
Professor of
Dynamical Systems in 1990.
In the seventies, exciting developments in applied mathematics were the
theoretical analysis
and numerics around the KAM theorem in Hamiltonian mechanics and the many new
results in the
analytic foundations of asymptotic analysis. His research papers and books
reflect his
interest in both fields.
Starting in 1969, he visited regularly East European conferences, first from
curiosity, but
increasingly from a feeling that ``something had to be done'' about this
unnatural split of
Europe into two parts. These visits triggered cooperation with East European
colleagues that
are continuing until today.
As usual, he held a number of administrative positions; for instance, he
chaired for several
years the Foundation which ran the University of Utrecht Weekly. This stimulated
his interest
in the media and in communicating science. In 1985 he founded a publishing company, Epsilon Uitgaven, which
publishes
science books, in particular mathematics books, in Dutch.
For nine years he was an editor of SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics. He is still an editor of
the Journal of Nonlinear Science, Zeitschrift f. Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik,
Nonlinear Dynamics, SIAM series on Classics in Mathematics, Epsilon Uitgaven (managing editor),
Zebrareeks.
Mathematics is an international affair and doing mathematics research has
entailed many visits
and good contacts all over the world. Listing the visits, lasting at least a month,
these were
(with the host between brackets): Imperial College, London (J.T. Stuart),
Academy of Sciences,
Moscow (A. Povzner), Institute of Thermomechanics, Academy of Sciences,
Prague (A. Tondl),
Department of Mathematics, Princeton University (P.J. Holmes), Department
of Physics, Sapienza
University, Roma (A. Degasperis), Department of Theoretical and Applied
Mechanics, Cornell
University (R.H. Rand), Department of Mathematics, University of Milano
(G. Gaeta).
Finally a word about ancestors. In 1625, ancestor Willem Verhulst,
established and directed a settlement on
the island Manhattan. His directorship was not very successful and
the Verhulst
family has little control over the island nowadays.
Another family relation, Pierre Francois Verhulst, is further removed in
the family tree. Around
1570, when the war between the Dutch and the Spanish Empire started, this part
of the Verhulst
family was sidetracked to stay in the Southern Netherlands, now Belgium. Pierre
Francois
became a specialist in elliptic functions and invented around 1850 the
post-Malthusian
logistic equation.