Today I learned that Ernie Esser passed away on March 8th, 2015 at age 34. Ernie was a PostDoc at UBC, Vancouver (PhD from UCLA) and worked in applied mathematics, especially imaging, optimization and inverse problems. I can’t say that I knew him very well – but we were in the similar research communities and I remember sitting with him in restaurants and chatting at several occasions (e.g. in Vancouver and Hong Kong…) and I remember him as a perticularly nice guy. Also I followed his work and it frequently happened that I found papers by him thinking “ok, that’s solved” crossing a problem from the list of thing I would have liked to work on.

I am seriously shocked to learn that he died from pneumonia, especially at his young age. There is a obituary weblog here and I am glad that his workgroup did not only set up this page but also plans to do a scientific event to recognize his work.