Review of the Proceedings of the Special Session of the Sixty-First Annual Congress of the South African Mathematical Society in Honour of James Fairley McKenzie (1938–2015)

Abstract

James Fairley McKenzie, who was a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Natal from 1981 to 1998, would have been 80 in May 2018. A Special Session was held in his honour at the Annual Congress of the South African Mathematical Society at Rhodes University in December 2018. At the Special Session his career in research and teaching was outlined, appreciations by his former PhD students and the early career academics he mentored were made, papers in the areas of research to which he and his students had contributed were presented, and his legacy in research, supervision and mentoring was assessed. A summary of the Special Session is presented in this paper.

Keywords:

• planetary and solar plasmas
• diffusive shock acceleration
• ion cyclotron damping
• wave shock interactions
• solitons
• Rossby waves
• Cherenkov radiation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank both referees for their constructive comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for financial support for the Special Session in Honour of Professor James McKenzie (1938–2015) at the Sixty-First Annual Congress of the South African Mathematical Society at Rhodes University from 3 to 5 December 2018. DPM acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation, South Africa, under Grant No. 96270.