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Reuel Shinnar at 80: An Appreciation Reuel Shinnar turned 80 on September 15, 2003, just 2 months after celebrating his marriage to Mildred Green and 1 week after teaching the first class in his fall semester graduate course at CUNY’s City College of New York. We have been privileged to know Reuel for some 4 decades. He has been, and remains, a profound and creative intellectual force, whether addressing chemical process control or fine points of Torah. The poem by Rutherford Aris in this issue captures the scope of Reuel’s professional accomplishments, and we cannot match its charm; rather, we seek to flesh out the portrait of our good friend, colleague, and continuing mentor. Reuel was born in Vienna, spent a portion of the war years as a refugee in Sweden, and then emigrated to Palestine (prestate Israel), where he received his undergraduate education in chemical engineering at the Technion. He worked in the Israel Military Industry until 1954, while also receiving a M.Sc. from the Technion. Following a Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1957, he returned to the Israel Military Industry in 1962 as the Technical Manager of Explosives and Ammunition, teaching part time at the Technion. He then spent 2 years at Princeton’s Guggenheim Jet Laboratories, after which he joined City College of the City University of New York as Professor of Chemical Engineering. He
was named Distinguished Professor in 1979. Reuel has been an influential consultant to industry during his tenure at City College, and many of his 15 patents from that period are in use; there are 30 fluidized catalytic cracking units based on his novel design in use around the world, for example. Reuel’s published research is formidable in scope, purpose, originality, rigor, and impact. The hallmark of his work is the integration of his experience as a designer into his fundamental research, enabling him to utilize the tools of engineering science in practical applications, and his novel insights have had a strong impact on the practice of chemical engineering. In one series of insightful papers, for example, he pointed out that the inherent inaccuracies and uncertainties in the process models used in the chemical industry require that the design methodology for controllers be fundamentally different from that in the aerospace and electronic industries. These papers were a turning point in the application of modern control theory to real chemical processes, and they initiated a major shift in research by the chemical engineering control community. Reuel’s contributions to process control, reaction engineering, crystallization, filament breakup, process economics, and thermodynamic analysis of reaction
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systems are well-known in the profession, and they are the primary reasons for his election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985 and his receipt of AIChE's Alpha Chi Sigma (1979) and Founders (1992) Awards. His contributions outside traditional chemical engineering are perhaps less known to the chemical engineering community, but they are of no less significance. His papers on the criminal justice system1,2 are routinely cited in criminology texts and analyses of sentencing guidelines. His paper on industrial performance3 has had a profound effect on economic thinking regarding corporate financial analysis. His analysis of Modern Orthodoxy4 is a significant sociological study of his own religious community. One of the joys of discussing any topic with Reuel is his willingness to take a stand. His recent Letter in Chem. Eng. News5 on fuel cells is classic Shinnar; it starts with an indisputable array of evidence, demands a logical but unpopular conclusion, and ends with the observation “How the promoters of fuel cells could convince government agencies to subsidize with large sums of money a technology that wastes money and poisons the environment with greenhouse gases is a subject that I will leave to sociologists to explain”. To Reuel, until 120:
Literature Cited (1) Avi-Itzhak, B.; Shinnar, R. Quantitative Models in Crime Control. J. Crim. Justice 1973, 1, 185-217. (2) Shinnar, R.; Shinnar, S. The Effects of the Criminal Justice System on the Control of Crime, a Quantitative Approach. Law Soc. Rev. 1975, 581. (3) Shinnar, R.; Dressler, O.; Feng, C. D.; Avidan, A. Estimation of the Rate of return for Industrial Companies. J. Bus. 1989, 62, 417. (4) Helmreich, W. B.; Shinnar, R. Modern Orthodoxy in America: Possibilities for a Movement Under Siege; Publication VP383; Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: Jerusalem, Israel, 1998. (5) Shinnar, R. Fuel-cell faux pas. Chem. Eng. News 2003, 81, No. 14.
Morton Denn* The Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics, City College of the City University of New York, New York, New York 10031 Dan Luss Department of Chemical Engineering University of Houston Houston, Texas 77204-4004 IE0307582
