Professor Emeritus Sergiu Aizicovici
Dr. Sergiu Aizicovici developed a passion for mathematics in middle school, so choosing math as his college major was an easy decision—a decision that led to a 31-year career in the Mathematics Department at Ohio University.
His passion for math never waned, and his time in Athens adds up to many student and alumni lives touched—with magical lectures and chalk holders—and a significant research contribution.
For Aizicovici, his college days started at the University of Iasi in Romania, where he earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics. He defended his Ph.D. in 1977 with a dissertation titled “Existence and regularity problems for nonlinear evolution equations in Hilbert spaces.”
He joined Ohio University in fall 1989 as a tenure track associate professor and was promoted to full professor with tenure in 1993. He retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.
“I enjoyed the company of my colleagues, and the interaction with our undergraduate and graduate students. In May, when the pandemic lockdown was in place, I was deeply moved by the initiative of many of my colleagues who organized a driving procession in front of my Athens house to honor my retirement. I also received many nice messages from some of those who couldn’t participate,” says Aizicovici.
“Thanks to OU for 31 wonderful years.”
Magical Lectures—and Chalk Holders
Aizicovici touched many lives through his teaching and mentoring at OHIO, and he still keeps in touch with four of his six Ph.D. students, including two who are now full professors.
Alumnus Dr. Mark McKibben (Ph.D. 1999), Professor of Mathematics at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in stochastic processes. He recently was named to the College of Arts & Sciences Notable Alumni. See Notable Alumni | Mark McKibben Specializes in Determining, Applying Randomness.
Yuqing Chen (Ph.D. 2000) is currently full professor at Guandong University of Technology in China and a prolific researcher in the field of nonlinear evolution equations.
Last year, Aizicovici received a teacher appreciation award plaque from some of his graduate students that reads: “Presented to Prof. S. Aizicovici. Recognizing the many hours you have given. Your efforts have made a world of difference.”
Partial Differential Equations (MATH 6411, 6412) was Aizicovici’s favorite class to teach, and it was memorable for his students.
“First of all, I must thank you again for teaching me the PDE classes and giving us a good recommendation to enter the Ph.D. program. In our first year at MSU, we had to take three qualifying exams (we took PDE, Analysis and Algebra), and we got our results very recently and we both passed all the three exams,” notes a graduate student from his PDE I and II classes.
“I am so lucky that I took your classes and I must tell you that, your lectures were magical…. There were two particular problems in our qualifying exam which were done in your lecture notes, and we could answer them perfectly, but for other students, they were the most challenging ones.”
Another student says the magic was in Aizicovici’s chalk, not just his lectures, “Kindly, could you please give me your ‘chalk holder’ that you used in class! I know there is no magic in it, but I need it to remember you and keep it forever. The main reason behind that is, I have learned a lot of good things from you as a prof and as a person. Back in Libya, most of the professors do not deal with their students like what you have done, and I am trying to change my way of teaching and follow your way.”
Some recent students commented:
“Thank you for the recommendations you gave me. I am more than happy to have been taught by you as those foundations are really helping me now in my research for a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University.”
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“I want to thank you for a great semester. This class has been very challenging, informative, and rewarding. Thank you for all your help during office hours and in class.”
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“I write this email to let you know how grateful I am to have you as my professor for the past two semesters. You have been an amazing teacher, we have learned a lot from you not only as students but as aspiring lecturers. I admire your teaching techniques, and I would love to be a teacher like you. Thank you for sharing your excellent knowledge of Differential Equations. I have gained a lot of interest in the field and I will definitely like to pursue it at Ph.D. level.”
An International Research Profile
Geography was never a boundary for Aizicovici, who held visiting appointments around the world, trained doctoral students who now teach in several countries, produced oft-cited research, and even brought an international conference to Ohio.
“My research field is differential and integral equations. In the beginning I studied integral equations of Volterra type, and later I focused on partial differential equations. My publication list includes 143 papers, one book, one book chapter, and one book edited,” Aizicovici notes.
According to MathSciNet, his results have been cited 1,106 times by 472 authors. “In particular, my joint book with N.S. Papageorgiou and V. Staicu, Degree Theory for Operators of Monotone Type and Nonlinear Elliptic Equations with Inequality Constraints, published by the American Mathematical Society in 2008, has been cited 184 times,” he says.
“The edited volume (jointly with N. H. Pavel), Differential Equations and Control Theory, which was published by Marcel Dekker in 2002, contains the proceedings of an International Workshop on Differential Equations and Control Theory organized by us at Ohio University.”
Aizicovici was invited to give conference or colloquium talks about his research in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Israel, Italy, England, France, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic, Portugal and Romania.
His visiting appointments included Israel Institute of Technology (1988), Carnegie-Mellon University (1988-89), and University of Aveiro, Portugal (2005), as well as shorter research stays at University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980), Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1997), Helsinki University of Technology, Finland (1997), Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan (2002), University of Halle, Germany (2005), Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic (2005), and Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia (2005).
He also served on the editorial board of several professional journals and acted as a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt fur Mathematik. He received the George Tzitzeica National Award of the Romanian Academy of Sciences (1980), and was elected as a member of the New York Academy of Sciences (1994).
At Ohio University, his research was supported by the National Science Foundation (1991-94) and the National Institutes of Health (2009-13).
Service
Aizicovici also provided substantial service to the Mathematics Department at OHIO.
He served as graduate chair (1996-99 and 2005-06), department chair (2000-04), and chair of the Promotion and Tenure Committee (on and off from 2006 to 2020).
“During my chairmanship, our department organized a sectional meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Ohio University. The number of math undergraduate majors and that of graduate students increased. We were also able to hire several outstanding group I faculty members,” he notes.
What will Aizicovici miss the most? “The intellectual dynamism of the university, the discussions with my colleagues, and mostly the daily interaction with our students. I will also miss Athens, our hometown for the last 31 years.” He now resides in the Madison, Wis., area.
“I will continue doing mathematics. I have a long list of literature books to read, particularly biographies. I would also like to travel, provided that the current pandemic will be contained. Last, but not least, I plan to spend more time with my grandson, who is 9 years old.”
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