Erik Rauch

Erik Rauch (May 15, 1974-July 13, 2005) was a biophysicist and theoretical ecologist who worked at NECSI, MIT, Santa Fe Institute, Yale University, Princeton University, and other institutions.Rauch's most notable paper was published in "Nature" and concerned the mathematical modeling of the conservation of biodiversity.

Biography

He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University in May 1996. His undergraduate thesis was "The Geometry of Critical Ising Clusters", under the direction of Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry. He then worked at the IBM Watson Research Center in the theoretical physics department, and began graduate study at Stanford University in 1996. He received his PhD. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 under the direction of Gerald Sussman: his thesis topic was " Diversity of Evolving Systems: Scaling and Dynamics of Genealogical Trees "He then joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Simon A. Levin, the Moffett professor of Biology in 2005, and was in that position at his early death.

His hobby of collecting place names led Rauch to found MetaCarta with John Frank and Doug Brenhouse. Using MetaCarta's software, Rauch developed maps like the four below for fun. Rauch was an inventor of spatial information processing systems. [http://www.freshpatents.com/Searching-by-using-spatial-document-and-spatial-keyword-document-indexes-dt20060216ptan20060036588.php]

He founded several organizations, including
* [http://freebiology.org/wiki/ALife_Boston ALife]
* [http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/501291 TerraShare]
* MetaCarta.

He died in a hiking accident [http://www.rrbbs.com/cgi-bin/bbs/thread.pl?13-1647] in California's Sequoia National Park at age 31.

Published works related to biological diversity

*cite journal|author=Erik M. Rauch and Yaneer Bar-Yam|title=Long-range interactions and evolutionary stability in a predator-prey system|journal=Physical Review E | volume=73|year=2006

*cite journal|author=Rauch, E.M. and Yaneer Bar-Yam |title=Estimating the total genetic diversity of a spatial field population from a sample and implications of its dependence on habitat area | journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | volume=102 |issue=28 | pages= 9826–9829.|doi=10.1073/pnas.0408471102|year=2005|pmid=15998741|unused_data=|, year=2005
*cite journal|author=Erik M. Rauch and Yaneer Bar-Yam|title=Theory predicts the uneven distribution of genetic diversity within species | journal=Nature|volume=431|pages=449–452|year=2004|doi=10.1038/nature02745

*cite journal|author=Erik M. Rauch H. Sayamer and Yaneer Bar-Yam|title=Dynamics and genealogy of strains in spatially extended host-pathogen models | journal=Journal of Statistical Physics | volume=114| issue=5-6 |year=2004 | pages=1417–1451

*cite journal|author=Rauch, E.M., Millonas, M.M.|title=The role of trans-membrane signal transduction in Turing-type cellular pattern formation | journal= Journal of Theoretical Biology | volume=226 | issue=4| pages= 401–407|year=2004|doi=10.1016/j.jtbi.2003.09.018

*cite journal|author= De Aguiar, M.A.M., Rauch, E.M., Bar-Yam, Y. | title=Mean-field approximation to a spatial host-pathogen model | journal = Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics | volume= 67 |number= 047102| year=2003| pages= 471021–471024

*cite journal|author= Rauch, E.|title=Discrete, Amorphous Physical Models | journal= International Journal of Theoretical Physics|volume=42 |issue=2 | year= 2003 |pages= 329–348|doi=10.1023/A:1024455602163

*cite journal|author= Rauch, E.M., Sayama, H., Bar-Yam, Y. |title=Relationship between measures of fitness and time scale in evolution | journal= Physical Review Letters |volume=88 | issue=22 |pages=228101/1–228101/4 |year=2002 |doi=10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.228101

*cite journal| author=Berz, G., Kron, W., Loster, T., Rauch, E., Schimetschek, J., Schmieder, J., Siebert, A., Smolka, A., Wirtz, A. |title= World map of natural hazards - a global view of the distribution and intensity of significant exposures | journal = Natural Hazards | volume=23 | issue=2-3 |year=2001 |pages= pp. 443–465 |doi= 10.1023/A:1011193724026

References

* [http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/~rauch/diversity/ Diversity is unevenly distributed within species] an informal presentation of the results in the above paper (Nature 431, 449-452)
* [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=84160 Erik Rauch] -- Mathematics Genealogy Project.

External links

* [http://xenon.stanford.edu/~erikr/vita.html Erich Rauch's CV] at Stanford

* [http://www.erikrauch.org/ www.erikrauch.org] A snapshot of the web surrounding Rauch's original webpage. As of 2005, many of the papers could be read from their original servers linked from [http://www.swiss.csail.mit.edu/~rauch/ Erik's primary home page at MIT.]

* [http://www.no-violence.info no violence period] Rauch's compilation of "Unconventional Pro-Life Perspectives on Abortion and the Right to Life"

* Available through AIP: [http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet/VerityServlet?KEY=PLEEE8&ONLINE=YES&smode=strresults&sort=rel&maxdisp=25&threshold=0&allprl=1&pjournals=PLEEE8&pyears=aps2000s&possible1zone=multi&bool1=and&possible2=rauch&possible2zone=author&OUTLOG=NO&viewabs=PLEEE8&key=DISPLAY&docID=1&page=1&chapter=0| Long-range interactions and evolutionary stability in a predator-prey system]

* [http://www.metacarta.com MetaCarta]