On 5 July 2001 the mathematician Professor Erhard Meister passed away at the age of 71. Until the very last days of his life he remained busy with his scientiÿc work.
Erhard Meister was born on 12 February 1930 in Bernburg/Saale and attended school at Bernburg from 1936 to 1948. He started an electrical engineering apprenticeship which was completed in the following three years at the Gro kraftwerk Mannheim. In 1951 he began his university studies in Heidelberg in the subjects of mathematics and physics and attained his diploma in 1956. For the following two years he worked as a scientiÿc employee in the German Research Establishment of Aeronautics in M uhlheim/Ruhr.
In 1958 he began work as an assistant at the University of Saarbr ucken and became a lecturer at the Institute of Mathematics in 1964. During that time he had two prolonged scientiÿc stays abroad: at the Technical University of Berlin (winter 1965-66) and at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (spring 1966). Subsequently he went to Berlin where he got his ÿrst position as full professor at the Faculty of Mathematical Sciences starting in 1966.
In 1970 he became a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of T ubingen occupying the chair of mathematical physics. Finally, from 1974 until 1998, he was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Darmstadt University of Technology. There he found excellent opportunities to work together with colleagues from the ÿelds of mathematics, engineering and the applied sciences.
The scientiÿc work of Professor Meister belongs mainly to the applications of mathematics, and in a wider sense, to mathematical physics. The ÿrst part was devoted to aero and uid dynamics; in particular, he obtained results in the theory of hydrofoils and wings and was able to work out consistent models for electroviscous uids. His studies of contemporary fundamental progress in functional analysis, operator theory, complex analysis and other developing areas resulted in the supervision of some thirty Ph.D. theses, a number of survey articles, advanced lectures and three textbooks.
Building up a strong research team, he was later on concerned, together with his working group, with problems in the mathematical di raction and scattering theory for microwaves in acoustics, electromagnetics and elasto-dynamics, which could be transformed into mixed boundary and transmission problems as well as initial-boundary value problems over canonical domains. Starting with the Sommerfeld di raction problem and its generalizations, the corresponding basic integral equations are of Cauchy or Wiener-Hopf type, and have been considered by analytical methods like pseudodi erential equations as well as by boundary element and wavelet methods. The mathematical studies on the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions in the neighbourhood of geometric singularities on the one hand, and for short and long periods on the other, are used in several applied disciplines such as radar techniques, computer tomography, material science and geophysics.