Professor emeritus of engineering science and associate dean for international relations, George Leitmann celebrates his 50th anniversary in the ME Department this year. His 50-year Berkeley career has included everything from research and teaching to serving as the first ombudsman in the UC system.

He graduated from Newtown High School, a technical high school
in Queens, N.Y., in December 1944 and volunteered for the army V8
science and engineering officers' training program but entered the U.S Army in February 1945 in the 286th Combat Engineer Batallion which landed in France in the fall of the year. For his 1945 role in capturing Colmar, in Alsace-Lorraine, he was awarded France’s highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes. On June 1, 2005, the French Ministry of Defense invited Leitmann to Paris to celebrate the 60-year anniversary of the battle and to receive the Croix de Guerre again, this time in the form of a medal as opposed to the ribbon they had originally presented.

In the summer of 1945 he was transfered to the Army Counterintelligence Corps as its youngest Special Agent and subsequently assigned to the Nuremberg war trials as an interrogator.

From 1946 - 1950 Leitmann attended Columbia University with a physics major. During the following seven years at the US Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, he worked mostly on rocket trajetory optimization and testing. During this period he also completed a PhD in Engineering Science at UC. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1957.

With the beginning of his appointment at UC in 1957 he began to extend his work in variational calculus and optimal control theory, both in theory and applications, some of which is contained in an introductory text (1967) and two edited volumes (1965 and '69), later expanded to a basic text (1981). This work was awarded the Goddard aerospace and the flight mechanics awards of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. That in turn led to research in dynamical game theory and its applications which can be found in three books (1966, 1967 and 1974) and numerous edited volumes. In the early 1970's and extending into the 1990's, this led to research on robust control with applications to uncertain systems in engineering, science, economics and management for which he was awarded the Levy medal of the Franklin Institute and more recently the first Isaacs Award of the International Society of Dynamic Games. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering as well as of six foreign academies of science and engineering, and he holds three honorary doctorates.

Since emeritation in 1991, he has returned to earlier work in the calculus of variations, especially numerous extensions of a 1967 paper, which resulted in about two dozen papers just in the past five years. Leitmann has also turned to topics of more recent interest such as an analysis of the dynamics of terrorism.

Professionally he edited or co-edited over a dozen journals including the largest and arguably the most prestigious journal of applied mathematics, the latter as editor for 16 years.

Since so many of Professor Leitmann's doctoral students and postdocs were international ones and his interests always transcended the US border, he became very involved with international collaborations, was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Prize in 1980 and subsequently the A. von Humboldt medal and the Werner Heisenberg medal of the A. von Humboldt Foundation. He was also active in University service with numerous campus committees, including service on the Budget Committee, chairing the Privilege and Tenure Committee of the Senate, and chairing the Faculty Advisory Committee on Research Expeditions. Administratively Leitmann served as chair of the Applied Mechanics Division and Vice-Chair for Research of the Mechanical Engineering Department. Since 1980 he has served in four Associate Dean positions, for Graduate Affairs, for Academic Affairs, for Research and currently for International Relations. He also served two terms as Chair of the Engineering Faculty.

On emeritation he was awarded the Berkeley Citation, one of the University's highest honors, and more recently was named a Berkeley Fellow, a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus and the Distinguished Emeritus of the Year.

In the community he currently serves as Chair of the Board of ARTSHIP, a small arts foundation is San Francisco.