William (Bill) Carl Schieve was born on April 28, 1929, in Portland, Oregon, to Rudolph Ray and Emily Auld Schieve. Ray Schieve was a superintendent of public works in Oregon.
Bill graduated from Grant High School in Portland, Oregon, in 1947. He ran track and was an honor student. In 1947, he entered Reed College, where he majored in physics. He graduated from Reed in 1951 and then entered graduate school at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he earned a BS and a PhD. While working on his PhD degree at Lehigh University, Bill was also a Bartol Research Foundation Fellow from 1956 to 1960. He received his PhD in October 1959. His thesis title was “The Equations of Motion of Point Singularities of the Electromagnetic and Charge Symmetric Scalar Meson Fields,” and his supervising professor was Peter Havas.
On December 27, 1951, Bill married Florence M. Gilleland in Portland, Oregon.
From 1960-1966, Bill worked as a principal Investigator at the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Nucleonics Division, in San Francisco, California. During the period from 1964-1965, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Brussels, Service de Chimie-Physique in Belgium.
He then returned to the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco, and from 1966-1967, he was Head of the Theoretical Group. In 1964, Bill was awarded a silver medal by the lab for his research. In 1967, Bill joined the Department of Physics and Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics (later renamed the Center for Complex Quantum Systems) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) as an associate professor. During the period April 1969 to September 1972, Bill served as Acting Director of the Center; the Director was Ilya Prigogine. In 1979, he was promoted to full professor, and he remained at UT until his retirement.
In 1986, Professor Schieve received an American Society for Engineering (ASEE) Education Summer Award at Navy Operational Support Center (NOSC) for work on the nonlinear and stochastic dynamics of the superconducting quantum interference device. In 1987, Bill was the recipient of the Humboldt Prize “Senior Distinguished U.S. Scientist Award” and subsequent to that spent January to September 1987 and summer 1988 at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. There, he worked on chaos theory in superconducting quantum interference devices, SQUID, particularly the effects of quantum and classical noise, which results in a semiclassical perturbation analysis of the mean-field description of the laser.
In 1989, he again received the ASEE award to NOSC, where a series of papers were begun on a new nonlinear dynamics model of the Hopfield Neural Network. A seminal result was achieved that showed how a large network by means of the so-called slaving principle could be viewed as effectively a one or two or few simple neuron dynamical system. He later helped obtain the simplest example of chaos in such a system.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Ulm, sponsored by the State of Baden-Württemberg. Bill had close collaborations with faculty at the University of Brussels, Service de Chimie-Physique, and spent a number of summers there, including 1969, 1970, 1973, and 1974.
Bill organized and ran numerous conferences and workshops that included topics such as Dissipative Structures in Social and Physical Sciences, Irreversibility in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Optics, and Modelling Complex Systems (in honor of Robert Herman).
Bill coauthored 164 articles and edited five books in the field of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and chaos. Titles include: Lectures in Statistical Physics; Self-Organization and Dissipative Structures; Classical Relativistic Many-Body Dynamics; Instabilities, Bifurcations, and Fluctuations in Chemical Systems, with colleague Linda E. Reichl.
His book with Lawrence P. Horwitz, Quantum Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge Press, 2009) is referenced frequently. Bill also coauthored with his student Matthew A. Trump the book Classical Relativistic Many-Body Dynamics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).
Bill supervised the PhD dissertations of more than 27 students, a number of whom went on to become leaders in their fields.
Following retirement in 2009, Bill and Florence moved to Fredericksburg, Texas, where they enjoyed a small farm and visitors from around the world.
Bill died September 19, 2020, in Fredericksburg. He is survived by his wife, Florence Schieve; his son Eric and Eric’s wife, Michelle Schieve; his daughter Catherine Schieve and her husband, Warren Burt; and four grandchildren: Jessica Morkin, Eugenie Schieve, Erica Alexander, and Jaimie Lycan.
