GEORGE LEITMANN (1925-2025)

BY UC BERKELEY ENGINEERING
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY ¹

GEORGE LEITMANN, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of engineering sciences, academic leader, and decorated war hero, died on Monday, May 19, just days before his 100th birthday.

Leitmann made seminal contributions to the theory of optimal control, dynamic games, and operation research, as well as applications to exterior ballistics of rockets, aerospace systems, economics, ecology, epidemiology, and counterterrorism, among others. His work has been used to optimize the design of aircraft and the ballistics of rockets, to analyze and understand the way the human immune response works when exposed to pathogens, and to minimize costs while maximizing productivity in business decisions.

He authored one of two authoritative textbooks on optimal control in the 1960s at a time when that discipline was still novel and was gaining popularity in the U.S., driven largely by the Space Race competition with the Soviet Union.

“George’s unique contribution was to present principles of optimal control — a novel field at that time — in a geometric manner,” said Maj Mirmirani (Ph.D.’77 ME), interim dean of engineering at Lawrence Technological University, dean emeritus at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and a former Ph.D. student of Leitmann’s. “He sketched out concepts, helped by visualizing trajectories in infinite-dimensional function spaces, which in turn made the field attractive to both mathematicians and engineers.”

Leitmann’s career at UC Berkeley spanned more than six decades, starting in 1957 when he joined the university as an assistant professor of engineering science in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Even after he retired from teaching in 1991, he remained a valued member of college leadership as a professor of the Graduate School, serving as the college’s de facto ambassador for foreign audiences, among other responsibilities.

“He was a valuable mentor to me when I joined the faculty in 1983, and I know that many of my fellow faculty members in engineering will tell you the same thing,” said S. Shankar Sastry (NAE 2001), former dean of Berkeley Engineering, at a 2013 ceremony honoring Leitmann. “He [had] chosen to spend what others may consider to be their retirement years serving as a senior member of the College of Engineering’s leadership team…. With the benefit of his advice and his wide network of contacts, we have successfully launched research and teaching collaborations all over the world.”

Numerous colleagues described Leitmann as a Renaissance man, proficient in math, engineering, art, history, and fine wine, to name a few topics. They pointed to Leitmann’s remarkable life experience before he joined UC Berkeley as strongly influencing his approach to his career in academia.

Born on May 24, 1925, in Vienna, Austria, Leitmann and his Jewish family left their home country in 1940 when Nazi occupation made it too perilous to stay. While Leitmann, his mother, and two grandmothers immigrated to the U.S. and settled in New York, his father escaped to neighboring Yugoslavia. A year later, his father was captured and died in the Crveni Krst concentration camp in Serbia, something his family would only learn more than 60 years after the end of the war.

After graduating in December 1943 with honors from high school, Leitmann enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving in the reconnaissance unit of the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion in France and Germany. The unit was attached to the French First Army, which liberated Colmar during the battle of the Colmar Pocket in the winter of 1944-45. For his reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines and acts of heroism, Leitmann was awarded the Croix de Guerre medal by France. In 2013, when Leitmann was named Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor — the highest decoration that can be given for civil or military conduct in service to the French Republic — a ceremony was held on the Berkeley campus in his honor.

Leitmann was also among the American soldiers who participated in the liberation of the Landsberg concentration camps near Munich, Germany. After the end of World War II, he became the youngest special agent of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, which included service as an interrogator at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.

He later recalled in his UC Berkeley oral history that seeing the bodies of Jewish prisoners who had perished “probably hit me more than it hit the rest of the guys, because…my father was still missing.”

Paul Burnett, who interviewed Leitmann for UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, noted the connection between Leitmann’s experience from WWII to his research.

“One key element of his life’s work is to account and control for highly improbable and catastrophic threats to a system, any system,” said Burnett in the introduction to the oral history. “Rarely has such an abstract theoretical research trajectory been so deeply informed by such a visceral experience of danger and catastrophe. This was one of the most striking themes of these interviews: plan for the improbable and the terrible. Don’t look away.”

After his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1946 and with the support of the GI Bill, Leitmann enrolled at Columbia University, where he earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees in physics in 1949 and 1950, respectively. Afterward, he was recruited to work on the theoretical foundations of rocket research for the U.S. Navy, serving as physicist and head of the Aeroballistics Analysis Section at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Research Department in China Lake, California.

While there, Leitmann met his future wife, Nancy Lloyd, whom he married in 1955. He was also enrolled at UC Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. degree in engineering science in 1956. A year later, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor of engineering science, rising to full professor in 1963.

In addition to his research contributions, Leitmann took on numerous administrative roles at UC Berkeley. At the College of Engineering, Leitmann held positions as associate dean for graduate study and research, associate dean for academic affairs, faculty chair, acting dean, director of international programs, and special adviser to the dean, among others. He was also chair of the Division of Applied Mechanics. During a time of campus unrest in 1968, he was named UC Berkeley’s first university ombudsman.

“George’s service in WWII and his knowledge of Europe — past and present — earned him a high degree of respect among international audiences, particularly those from Europe,” said Alexandre Bayen, Liao-Cho Professor of Engineering and director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. “If there was a meeting with an international delegation, George would be there, and the college greatly benefited from his presence, his perspective and his ability to bring people together.”

His former students remember Leitmann as a faculty member who would go above and beyond to make them feel supported. When F. Santiago Chen (Ph.D.’76 ME) got married in the summer of 1972 while he was still a Ph.D. student, he recalled how Leitmann drove three hours from Donner Lake to Berkeley to walk his bride, Anna, down the aisle at the wedding.

He received numerous awards throughout his life, honoring his career in and out of academia. In addition to the French honors noted earlier, he received the Order of Merit from Germany and Italy, and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class.

In 1982, Leitmann was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an American engineer. He was also a foreign member of academies of science and engineering in Argentina, Bavaria, Georgia, Italy, and Russia. His honors from UC Berkeley included a Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award and a Berkeley Citation Award.

Leitmann authored or co-authored more than 300 scholarly articles and 15 books, including An Introduction to Optimal Control (translated into four foreign editions, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and German) and The Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control. He received honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Vienna, the University of Paris, and the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Leitmann held membership in many professional and government committees. He was the founding president of the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America. He was co-editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications for 16 years, and he served as associate editor of four journals and editorial board member of eight journals.

“He had an unparalleled ability to balance intellect with kindness, and discipline with compassion for those less fortunate,” said his son, Josef Leitmann, at his father’s memorial service.

He is survived by his wife of 70 years, Nancy Leitmann; his son, Josef Leitmann; his daughter, Elaine Leitmann; three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In the last years of Leitmann’s life, he was working to support the construction of a memorial at the former Landsberg concentration camp, which he helped to liberate. The effort is organized by the European Holocaust Memorial Foundation Landsberg. Donations may be made via the affiliated Association for International Youth Encounters and Memorial Work in Dachau.