Steven Orszag GS ’66, who taught mathematics at Princeton from 1984 to 1998, passed away on Sunday at the age of 68. Those who knew him said he was a brilliant thinker who found joy in sharing his love of learning.
“His contributions were perhaps so basic that, 40 years later, people don’t realize that what they are using when making numerical computations of all sorts was the result of his work,” Yale physics professor and former colleague John Wettlaufer said.
Orszag was the first person to compute the velocity field of a turbulent flow, Wettlaufer said. He also helped shape the field of modern applied mathematics with his development of spectral methods, which pervades the study of many fields today, including weather forecasting, geophysical and astrophysical flows and turbulent flow around vehicles.
Despite his success, Orszag was also an accessible mentor for many of his students, his former colleagues said.
“He was an incredibly talented mathematician,” Wettlaufer said. “But he was simultaneously probably one of the most generous people I’ve ever worked with.”
During his 13 years as a professor at Yale, Orszag provided guidance to a wide range of students, including first-year undergraduates and post-doctoral fellows, Wettlaufer said.
Washington University in St. Louis physics professor Carl Bender, whose professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s overlapped with Orszag’s, said that Orszag engaged with students of varying levels of mathematical talent.
“He was fast-paced. You had to run to keep up with him,” Bender said. “But he was also warm and patient and humble at unexpected times.”
Bender and Orszag co-taught a graduate level math course at MIT for several years in the 1970s, and it soon became the largest and most popular one in the department, Bender said.
“It was so popular that a lot of students from Harvard came to take it as well,” he said. “A course that good really wasn’t offered at Harvard.”
The instruction notes that the two of them used during their seven years teaching the course were ultimately published as a book titled “Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory.” The textbook is now commonly described as “The Bible” of applied mathematics, Wettlaufer said.
Peter Orzsag ’91, the second son of Steven Orszag and the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview that, for his father, engaging with mathematical puzzles and challenges was a lifelong passion.
In his late 60s, Orszag built a computer for his granddaughter Leila and a GPU processor with a market value of roughly $8,000 that is still being used at Yale.
“He instilled a spirit of intensity,” Peter Orszag said of his father, who graduated from MIT at the age of 19. “He would say things like, ‘Don’t set your sights too low just because you’re a particular age.’ ”
Steven Orszag received a Ph.D. from the Princeton at the age of 22. He was a professor at MIT from 1967 to 1984 and then taught at Princeton for 14 years. He taught at Yale from 1998 to 2011.
During his time at Princeton, he served as the director of the Applied and Computational Mathematics program, director of the supercomputer center and founding director of the Steven A. Orszag Fluid Dynamics Research Center.
His many distinctions include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received in 1989.
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