Kenneth Ivan Golden

On 18 August 2020 the plasma and many-body theoretical communities lost a distinguished and much loved member, Kenneth Ivan Golden, following a protracted illness.

Ken, as he was known to us, was born in Chicago. His scientific career began in 1955 with his MS in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University and further qualifications from MIT. After a period of research with Hari Sen at the Air Force Geophysical Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts, where he became acting senior scientist, he took up a Fulbright Scholarship to study theoretical mechanics with Paul Germain at the Institut Henri Poincaré. His thesis established important relationships relating to shock front propagation in gases; he received his doctorate (mention très honorable) in 1964.

Ken’s first academic appointment was at Brandeis University, where he became visiting assistant professor. There he became the member of a small group interested in opening up research in the then-budding field of strongly coupled plasmas. He followed this with a long association with Northeastern University in Boston (1969–86), where he became George A. Snell Professor of Engineering. In 1986 Ken moved to the University of Vermont in Burlington to serve in senior professorial roles within the departments of computer science and electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. In 2016 he became Professor of Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, and Physics Emeritus.

Through the arc of his long highly productive career, Ken established himself as a leading expert in the fundamental dynamical properties of strongly coupled multicomponent plasmas, inevitably spilling over into wider aspects of strongly interacting condensed matter. Ken’s hallmark of uncompromising dedication to mathematical rigor and technical detail were also evident in his teaching and his services to the condensed matter and strongly coupled plasma community. By far Ken’s longest research association was with one of the undersigned (Gabor Kalman of Boston College), which resulted in the now popular quasilocalized charge approximation. At the same time Ken engaged in a remarkable number of other collaborations: from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to Australian National University in Canberra and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where his infectious enthusiasm invigorated new local, as well as international, collaborations. There were other links that Ken established, too many to recall here.

Ken’s energetic, focused contributions as an organizer of international meetings will also be long remembered. He chaired the International Advisory Board of the International Conference Series on Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems from 2004 to 2011.

Kenneth Golden leaves a legacy of deep and elegant papers covering plasma shock dynamics and strong-coupling dynamics in both classical and quantum Coulomb systems. He pioneered the research in the area of nonlinear fluctuation-dissipation relations. His last work for Physical Review E, “Higher-order fluctuation-dissipation relations in plasma physics: Binary Coulomb systems ,” was published in 2018, in the midst of his struggle with illness, and he was particularly proud to have brought it to completion.

Ken is survived by his beloved Sue, sons Chris and Matt, and their families. We miss him dearly.