Chris Byrnes was my friend, my very close friend and I miss him greatly.  I am sure most of this audience would say the same.  And there are many other people throughout the world who would say the same.  I wish he were at this podium right now because he would be here and he would give a much more interesting and funnier talk than I will.

I first met Chris in the mid seventies at a scientific conference and we bonded immediately.  We had a lot in common, two Irish Catholic working class kids from New York City interested in the mathematical theory of control.  But there was a vast difference, he was from the Bronx, the home of the Yankees, and I was from Brooklyn, the former home of the Dodgers.  By then neither of us were baseball fans so it was not a problem.

Chris was a remarkable man on many levels, a brilliant mathematician, a remarkable organizer, a funny raconteur and a loving father.   I can remember many wonderful meals shared with Chris, Cathy, Kathleen, Allison and Christopher in a variety of cities. He was very proud of his family and their accomplishments.

He was the last student of the eminent American mathematician Marshal Stone.  When he received his PhD in 1975 the academic job market was in a deep recession.  American colleges had hired many PhDs in the sixties to meet the needs of educating the baby boomers.   These faculty were still around in the seventies while the college population was shrinking.  Many new PhDs wound up driving cabs.  It sounds more than a little like today.

But you can’t keep a talented person down and Chris was extremely talented.  He found an instructorship at Utah and quickly went about building his reputation in systems theory, a field in which he had no prior training.  Chris always was a very quick study; he easily mastered new areas of mathematics with a deep intuition that allowed him to contribute almost immediately.  His brilliance was quickly recognized and he was appointed Assistant Professor at Harvard where he spent several years.   Chris always found it ironic that he was teaching at a university that probably would not have accepted him as a student.

Arizona State University wanted to build a group in systems theory and they made Chris an offer that was too good to refuse.   He quickly recruited several excellent faculty and demonstrated another of his talents, the ability to organize, lead and to inspire others.

Washington University has always had an international presence in the field of control and has produced excellent students through its department of Systems Science and Mathematics.  When it was time for the legendary John Zaborsky to retire as Chair, Chris was recruited as his replacement.  He served several years as Chair of SSM and then fifteen years as Dean of School of Engineering and Applied Science.   He made remarkable contributions to the school establishing the Department of Biomedical Engineering and numerous endowed chairs. 

Chris was an excellent mathematician who continued to do world-class research even while he was Dean.   This is a very difficult thing to accomplish, as a deanship does not afford the time for reflection and discovery that mathematics requires.   In recent years his work has been widely recognized by major awards from the two leading professional organizations in our field, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Control Systems Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

His organizational skills were put to good use during his deanship and also in the numerous scientific conferences that he chaired.  Chris chaired or co-chaired the Conference on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems three times, in Stockholm, Phoenix and St. Louis.  He co-chaired the first SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications in San Francisco and numerous workshops throughout the world.

As all of us know, Chris was wonderful man to be around.  If Chris was in the room so was laughter.  In the hope of evoking Chris I would like to tell a story that he liked to tell.  Chris’ first marriage broke up while he was at Harvard with some mutual bitterness.  By the time he got to Arizona State he had lost the ponytail that he had at Harvard and when he was here he was more into suits and ties.  So it came as some surprise to him that he was subjected to more rigorous searches at the airports when he returned home to Washington University from abroad.  The searches were so intrusive that Chris asked his friend Senator Danforth to look into it.  Danforth reported back that Chris had been put some US Customs special watch list.   It is probably a coincidence that Chris’s ex wife was working for the customs office at that time.

Although we all mourn Chris, I suggest that we all take a moment to be thankful that we had him as a friend and colleague. He ended on a high note. He and Renee were very happy and he just had a paper accepted by a prestigious journal.  Let us rejoice in his accomplishments.   We shall not see his like soon again.