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The Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization community mourns the loss of Professor George Rozvany, who founded this journal together with Dr. Jaroslaw Sobieski in 1989, and served as its Editor in Chief until his death. George Rozvany was a remarkable man, who left his mark on our community, thanks both to his outstanding vision and organizational skills and to his scientific contributions. This obituary is a short tribute to his great legacy.

Professor Rozvany started as an engineer, designing buildings, bridges and roads in Hungary, France and Australia, 1952–1963. His remarkable academic career started then at Monash University in Clayton Victoria in Australia, continued at Essen University in Germany, and at the time of his passing he was professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary.

Shortly before his death, Professor Rozvany indicated that his two most important contributions to the field of Structural Optimization were; (i) establishing the foundation of layout optimization with William Prager (1977) and (ii) doing basic work on the SIMP algorithm with Ming Zhou (1990). On this second contribution, I may note that he invented the acronym as solid isotropic microstructure with penalization, in a 1992 paper in SMO with Ming Zhou and Torben Birker, Generalized shape optimization without homogenization.

Though these were certainly seminal contributions to the field, he also made very important contributions to expanding Michell truss classes from early 1990s in collaboration with Tomasz Lewinski, Tomasz Sokol and others. In fact, Professor Rozvany collaborated and published papers together with most of the important contributors to Structural Optimization including (in addition to the names mentioned before and in alphabetical order) Martin Bendsoe, Gengdong Cheng, Bhushan Karihaloo, Uri Kirsch, Kurt Maute, Zenon Mroz, Niels Olhoff, Osvaldo Querin, Ole Sigmund, and Jaroslaw Sobieski.

In addition to founding the journal, Professor Rozvany founded the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (ISSMO) with a group of researchers in 1991 during a NATO ASI conference held in Berchtesgaden, Germany. He served on the Executive Committee of the Society until his death, and one of his important contributions was the encouragement he gave to young researchers: he established the Springer Prize for the best paper by a young researcher, and he always campaigned to reduce costs of attending conferences for students and young researchers.

On a personal note, Professor Rozvany had a profound impact on my own career, even though we did not have many research interactions. The journal and society that he founded offered the vehicles that allowed me to realize my potential in Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. I also had the extremely good fortune to work with him as co-editor of SMO for the past few years. I came to admire and benefit from his immense vitality and his kindness, good judgment and thoroughness.

Raphael Haftka, University of Florida, USA.

George ran the journal for more than two decades as its Editor-in-Chief. With the help of his co-editors, a board of senior advisors, review editors and editors he made it a flourishing platform for the exchange of high-quality research work. He was always open-minded about new developments, not only on the scientific side but also for technical changes. I took over the journal as publisher’s editor a few years ago and regularly met with George in Vienna at a café opposite the station where he stopped over on his journey from Budapest to Passau. He enjoyed the atmosphere of that place and we had very good and inspiring meetings, and I was very much impressed by his spirit and his activities. Being healthy at the time he himself raised the matter of a possible successor in case of health problems. That foresight allowed us a smooth transition now that he so unexpectedly passed away. Though I had only the opportunity to work with him for a short time, I will always remember him as great person.

Silvia Schilgerius

Publisher’s Editor, Springer