David Wilson – used with permission from the University of Leeds (https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/obituaries/2021/wilson_david.html).
David Wilson, who served as an associate editor and consulting editor of this journal passed away on 21 April 2021 after a brief but very serious illness. David was born in 1946 in the English city of Liverpool (a port city and home of the Beatles!) but a short time after moved to London with his parents, eventually residing in Pinner district. After school education, David studied Electrical Engineering at Northampton College of Advanced Technology, which became the City University in 1966 and is currently known as City, University of London. After graduating, he moved to Clare College, Cambridge University, to undertake PhD research in the control systems area under the supervision of Dr John R Roberts.
After completing his PhD, he moved with his wife Janet to Leeds in 1970 and for the next 36 years he was a member of the academic staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds, retiring in 2006 from the post of Reader (Associate Professor). The University of Leeds obituary written by his friend and colleague Des McLernon can be found here (https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/obituaries/2021/wilson_david.html) and pays due tribute to his enormous contributions to scholarship in his department and also gives details of his recreational interests, including jazz music and hill walking.
David will be best remembered for his research into reducing the order of linear time-invariant models for dynamic systems. This 1970s model-order-reduction work involved the minimisation of the error between the model output vector and the output vector of the original higher-order system model. No less significant though was his theoretical work over a twenty-year period, much of it collaborative with J. E. Rubio, on the optimal control of nonlinear distributed systems. These distributive systems included the nonlinear wave equation, multidimensional diffusion equations and the heat equation. David's last work in the 2000s, much of it collaborative with G. D. Halikias, centred on H-infinity type control problems and active suspension control so as to improve vehicle ride and steady-state vehicle handling.
His services to the journal over the years was exceptional and he was a much-valued colleague. David's area of specialisation was robust control and when he was first appointed to the role this topic was in an area of intense research effort, generating a very large number of submissions prior to manuscript handling software, and very strong contributions from many competing groups. Sometimes author frustration led to ‘angry' emails to the journal to which a manuscript had been submitted. In all this time, David never attracted any comments about manuscripts handled by him. The annual meeting of the editors and associate editors with the publisher was very much looked forward to by us all. David had perfected the art of balancing his glasses on his forehead long before it became the ‘in thing' and when this happened a decisive and to the point contribution immediately followed.