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Gordon F. Newell, Prof. Emeritus of Transportation Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneer of transportation science and operations research, died on February 16th in an automobile accident near Carmel, California, after attending a party with some friends. He was 76. I had the good fortune of knowing Gordon quite well, both on a personal and a professional level; we shared an office suite for 24 years and had many common interests, work-related and otherwise. Our friendship and close professional association gave me the opportunity to become quite familiar with his work. This is why (very humbly) I will reminisce here.
Before beginning, however, the reader should know that I write this with some hesitancy. Gordon hated awards, professional recognition, and notoriety in general. It was with great fear that I once announced to him that the International Advisory Board of the International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT) had decided to dedicate the 12th Symposium to him. When my U.C. Berkeley colleagues and I broke the news to him, only a few days before the symposium, we told him that the whole thing would be organized like a big party without a formal award ceremony. Perhaps because Gordon loved parties, he allowed us to go forward. In the end, he told me that he enjoyed the experience. I do not know if my friend would have liked an obituary to be published or not (certainly not as a paean to him), but I do know that he loved good ideas. Admiration for his ideas gives me the courage to write this piece.
Gordon Newell was born in Dayton, Ohio, on January 25, 1925, and raised in Rochester, New York. He attended Union College, where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1945. In 1950, he earned a Ph.D., also in physics, from the University of Illinois. His thesis and some of his initial publications explore in-depth the Ising model of statistical mechanics on two-dimensional lattices. After a 3-year postdoctoral stint at the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics with Elliott Montroll at the University of Maryland, he joined the Applied Mathematics Department of Brown University in 1953, where he stayed until 1965. He became interested in transportation...