In his recent Reith Lectures, the President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow, discussed the frontiers of science, of which he singled out three: the very large (cosmology and general relativity), the very small (subatomic particles and the quantum world) and the very complex. Though Rees is a cosmologist, he made the telling point that even a simple living organism is more complex than a star. The astonishing complexity of the living world gives rise not only to the life sciences, including medicine, but also to an inexhaustible supply of interesting mathematical problems. This was the area to which Jaroslav Stark devoted his all too brief scientific career as an applied mathematician and founding member of the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology at Imperial College London (CISBIC).
Jaroslav Stark was born in 1960 in Pardubice, in what is now the Czech Republic. His father, Jaroslav F. Stark (with whom his son later collaborated), was a paediatric heart surgeon; his mother Olga was a paediatrician. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 the family moved to Britain. Stark attended schools in St Albans, Boston, Massachusetts and London. He then read mathematics at Peterhouse in Cambridge, where he gained a first-class degree in 1982, followed by a distinction in part III of the mathematics tripos in 1983.
Stark then moved to Warwick University where he took his PhD under the supervision of Professor Robert McKay in 1986. Here he found the ideal environment for his particular interests and abilities. Under the leadership of Professor E. C. (Sir Christopher) Zeeman, Warwick soon established itself, after its foundation in 1965, as an elite mathematical centre to rival Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College. Zeeman was a pure mathematician who branched out into applied mathematics and encouraged others to do the same. McKay was a pioneer in dynamical systems and chaos theory (the kind of mathematics relevant to producing the best possible short to medium-range weather forecasts, but probing the impossibility, even in principle, of long-range weather forecasting). McKay also became interested in complexity as such, another fascination he passed on to Stark.
Stark did a year’s postdoctoral work at Warwick, with McKay and Professor David Rand, and another at Imperial College, before joining GEC, working in Wembley, northwest London, for the Long Range Research Laboratory. After four years with GEC, he benefited from an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council fellowship, which enabled him to change the focus of his research towards mathematical biology, where it remained, though his interest in dynamical systems proved lifelong.
He became a lecturer at University College London in 1993, a reader in 1996 and a professor in 1999. He joined the Mathematics Department at Imperial College as a professor in 2003. He became director of CISBIC in 2007.
Advertisement
While at Cambridge, Stark met Kate Hardy, a developmental biologist; they were married in 1987. The relationship was central to Stark’s life professionally as well as personally: the two collaborated extensively. Kate’s biological background and his mathematical background complemented each other perfectly. One particular interest they shared was the mechanism of ovulation and the disorders that may occur, such as polycystic ovary syndrome.
Stark also worked with his father on performance monitoring in heart surgery, a topic of national importance and controversy after the scandal in 1995 involving paediatric heart surgery in Bristol. Other collaborators included Lord Winston and Professor Paul Glendinning of the University of Manchester.
One of Stark’s early papers, with McKay, was on a topic in dynamical systems known as KAM theory, after the mathematicians Kolmogorov, Arnold and Moser; one of his last papers, with Glendinning, returned to the work of Vladimir Arnold (obituary, June 24). Stark was an engaging and outgoing person, well suited temperamentally to the demands of interdisciplinary scientific research. From childhood his passion was skiing.
When first diagnosed, his brain tumour was not thought to be life-threatening, and surgery was thought to have been successful. When his condition recurred, it became apparent that his illness was terminal.
He is survived by his wife and son.
Advertisement
Professor Jaroslav Stark, mathematician, was born on June 17, 1960. He died on June 6, 2010, aged 49