
Jonathan Dowling (1955-2020) - furcyd
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4839
======
coolgod
He was a brilliant professor with very distinctive humour, always dishing out
the memorable stories. He will be missed by the quantum optics community.

------
selimthegrim
I had dinner with him and Wilde the day before the Hearne Lecture Aaronson
gave as I was visiting LSU with some other grad students from Tulane. He
ribbed me for talking like faculty. It's a great loss for science, the state,
and the country.

------
samuelmarks
Met Professor Jon Dowling in Sydney (Australia) through our mutual friend and
collaborator Dr Peter Rohde. I fondly recall going to an underground whisky
bar—with a retinue of postdocs and a couple of academics—with Jon regaling us
with stories, and buying us all the whisky ! – Was even able to selfishly take
him aside to talk nonlinear optics and my own research topics, which he gave
expert insights into (and we later had some back-and-forth over online).

Really sad to hear of his passing. He will surely be missed.

Thanks for posting this Professor Scott Aaronson—and as we say—wish his family
long-life.

------
mturmon
Jon was a jewel. He ran a quantum computing group of about a dozen people at
the Jet Propulsion Lab that was next to my own group in the organization.
Eventually the NASA funding in that area got too tight and the group
disbanded.

Jon's group members were incredibly prolific article publishers, which always
caused considerable foot-shuffling when the annual ranking (back in the day, a
stack ranking, 1 thru N) was done. It was not much fun to be ranking our own
group members against Jon Dowling or Colin Williams.

Our weekly meetings with those one level up in the hierarchy were a major
snooze ... unless Jon was there. The dour manager could barely progress
through the agenda between Jon's wisecracks and asides. (And the manager was
powerless to clamp down on it because Jon was charming and a top contributor
at the same time.) Nothing got done at that meeting either way, but Jon made
it a lot more fun.

------
jonbaer
His talk on Quantum Sensing a couple of years ago is a great presentation,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNV_CzCeA0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNV_CzCeA0)
... RIP, irreplaceable.

------
aardvark291
Shocking - just a week ago he was posting like nothing was up.

I know it's traditional to not talk about the cause of death, but -- was it
Coronavirus?

~~~
mrosett
> has passed away at age 65, apparently due to complications from surgery.

