Rutherford Aris

Rutherford Aris, known as Gus (1929 to 2005), was a chemical engineer, control theorist and applied mathematician who spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota, where he was a regents professor of chemical engineering from 1958 and later professor emeritus. Born in Bournemouth, England, he began at seventeen as a laboratory technician at Imperial Chemical Industries while studying part-time for a University of London degree, and then worked at ICI Billingham on catalysis, heat transfer, gas scrubbing and chromatography, extending Geoffrey Taylor's work on dispersion. At Minnesota his research covered optimization, dynamic programming, control theory, Taylor diffusion and the mathematical modelling of chemical reactors, and he wrote on fluid mechanics and on mathematical models for porous catalysts.