Our long-time colleague Vladimir Scheffer passed away on April 14th after complications from a brief illness. More information can be found at https://www.spezzifuneralhome.com/memorials/vladimir-scheffer/5178281/service-details.php. Vladimir Scheffer's mathematical work is best noted for his breakthrough results on the regularity of the notoriously difficult Navier-Stokes equation, where he showed solutions to a modification of this equation have a singular set of relatively small size. This work remains highly influential to this day, with nearly 200 citations. In addition to his work on the Navier-Stokes, Vladimir and our former colleague Jean Taylor prepared a roughly 1,000 page proof by their Ph.D. advisor Fred Almgren, which was posthumously published due to their dedicated efforts. Such a lengthy work was very hard to distribute, and thus Vladimir's selfless efforts here (which included retyping and re-typesetting the entire document!) were crucial to the dissemination of major ideas (which in turn influenced important modern work).
According to Fields medalist Cedric Villani the so-called Scheffer-Shnirelman paradox is the most surprising mathematical paradox, even surpassing the Banach-Tarski "volume doubling" paradox, since the former does not invoke the axiom of choice. Jeremy Gray goes so far as to call it "surely the most astonishing result in all of fluid mechanics". Vladimir was also a very popular undergraduate teacher, often coordinating the many sections of Calculus, and loved by both students and colleagues for his gentle nature. He was also a crucial faculty member in our undergraduate operation, and a constant go-to source of wisdom on many important details of calculus instruction at Rutgers.