Paul R. Garabedian

Paul Garabedian, Mathematician at N.Y.U., Dies at 82

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: June 4, 2010

Paul R. Garabedian, a mathematician whose computer computations helped lead to fuel-efficient wings for modern jetliners, died May 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

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Paul R. Garabedian

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The cause was prostate cancer, according to New York University, where Dr. Garabedian was a professor of mathematics and the director of the division of computational fluid dynamics at the university’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Passenger airplanes fly at speeds approaching the speed of sound. That posed a problem for wing designers, because as the air is whipped around the curved shape of a wing, it briefly accelerates to supersonic speeds. That generates shock waves — essentially small sonic booms — that greatly increase air resistance, requiring more fuel to maintain speeds.

In the 1960s and ’70s, aerospace engineers tried to solve the problem by seeking exact mathematical equations or relying on intuition. Dr. Garabedian, who started his career as a pure mathematician working on partial differential equations, was one of the first to realize that computer simulations could provide accurate enough approximations.

Indeed, his computer simulations showed it was possible to design a wing that produced no shock waves at all.

“That had quite a lot of impact around the industry,” said Antony Jameson, an engineering professor at Stanford who collaborated with Dr. Garabedian on the wing work.

Dr. Garabedian’s technique produced wings that were “shock free” for only specific values of speed and lift, so his shock-free wing designs were of limited practical use for aerospace engineers and never became the basis for the actual design of airplanes. Nonetheless, the fact that there was a shock-free solution “changed people’s thinking,” Dr. Jameson said.

In the late ’70s, Dr. Garabedian switched his focus from wings to nuclear fusion, looking for magnetic field structures that could better hold and harness hot gases for future power plants. He was still working on that problem at his death.

Paul Roesel Garabedian was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 2, 1927, and was taught at home by his parents, who both held Harvard graduate degrees. Harvard rejected him when he applied for college at 16, and he attended Brown University instead. After graduating from Brown, he went to Harvard for his master’s and doctoral studies, completing his Ph.D. in 1948.

After working for one year at the University of California, Berkeley, and nine years at Stanford, Dr. Garabedian joined New York University and remained there for the next 51 years.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Among many awards, Dr. Garabedian received the Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis. His first book, Partial Differential Equations, published in 1964, continues to be used worldwide. Dr. Garabedian is survived by his wife, Lynnel; two daughters, Emily Garabedian of Riverside, Calif., and Catherine Garabedian of Boston; and two grandchildren.

Although Dr. Garabedian’s biggest academic contributions were in computational calculations, “he never wrote a computer program himself,” Dr. Jameson recalled about their collaborations in the 1970s.

Dr. Jameson said that Dr. Garabedian would sit in his N.Y.U. office behind a large desk, “which was completely bare,” and write in a 4-inch-by-6-inch notebook, “which none of us ever saw.”

While Dr. Garabedian reviewed and understood the computer programs, it was his colleagues like Dr. Jameson who wrote them. That made him something of an anomaly in his field.

“His style was kind of astonishing,” Dr. Jameson said.