In Memoriam France Allard

With very great sadness I have learned about the passing of my long time friend and collaborator France Allard.

I have known France since about 1986 when we were both students at the ITA in Heidelberg. She had just moved from Montreal to start as a graduate student and we ended up with the same advisor for our dissertations (Rainer Wehrse). With her thesis on atmosphere models of M dwarfs she was pushing the state of the art a decade or two ahead. At the time we collaborated loosely, around 1993 our collaboration intensified with her suggestion to merge our, at the time, separate codes to expand modeling capabilities. Here is the relevant comment in the PHOENIX changelog:

* 4.0.0: exchanged the old EOS with the molecular EOS of
* France Allard. Added Brent-style solver for pure ion
* eos, added molecules consistently. (phh, 21/jul/93)

From there on, we (together with Eddie Baron) collaborated closely and, I dare say, very successfully on many many PHOENIX versions and generated a vast number of models. We spent countless hours and days discussing new ideas (hers were often brilliant and almost always good), code problems and possibilities, fixing innumerable bugs etc etc. I remember intense discussion sessions at the CRAL in the late 90's and early 2000's when I (and later also Travis Barman) was visiting her over the summer. Around 2005 our scientific interests drifted apart a bit and France continued to work on her fork of PHOENIX, constantly expanding its capabilities.

A few closing random thoughts:

• Before starting her work in Heidelberg, France took a six week crash course in German at the Goethe Institute in Freiburg (if memory serves me correctly), with no prior knowledge of the language. I could not believe how well she spoke and understood German when she came to Heidelberg.
• We had a number of rather epic scientific fights. She was always right. Her Fortran code was horrid, though.
• The PHOENIX comments in French are all from France. I have no idea what they say (this was before Google Translate). I suspect that was in part intentional, whereas France of course could read all my comments, in English or German.
• She cared very much about observations and trying to reproduce them with models and synthetic spectra. She was very annoyed when I did not seem to worry about observations as much as she did.
• 28.2% of 'my' refereed papers are co-authored by France.
• France was very competitive and intense, but never unfriendly to the competition.
• When following a new idea, France was immensely focussed, sometimes totally forgetting everything around her. Including colloquium talks scheduled long in advance, buying food for the weekend and other such trivialities.
• My visits to France at the CRAL often went like this: In the first days France explained a new idea/concept to me (getting upset when I was too slow to get it), which obviously needed to be added to PHOENIX like two days ago. After some initial work, it turns out that a simple implementation was either horribly complex and/or incredibly slow (e.g., requiring a few micro-Hubble-times in core-hours to compute, nowadays that is not that big of a deal, but in the late 90's it was bad news). This meant a major redesign, which sometimes was mostly finished at CRAL, sometimes requiring a dedicated project (quite a few dissertations started like this).
• I thought that France's talks were too much data and too little theory, I am pretty sure that she thought that my talks were too much theory and not enough data (if any). Guess who got (rightfully!) invited to give presentations at conferences. Which was also a good thing because:
• France loved going to conferences, give presentations and travel all over the planet (I am pretty sure she would have travelled off-planet for a conference on the ISS or the Moon). She often seemed to have complicated travel arrangements that she changed/fixed on the fly.
• From time to time France sent me emails asking about the reason for a crash or error message from a PHOENIX run. More often than not she did not include enough information to guess an answer (I suspect that was intentional). In recent years that was her way to touch bases, I think.
• She also did this to great effect to get us to think about extending PHOENIX capabilities, i.e., by running it outside the intended parameter ranges and watching it crash or produce nonsense (a few times it even worked on the first attempt). That's one reason why there are no safety checks in PHOENIX, that would stifle creative new uses (but makes it close to impossible for non-experts to use it correctly).

Astronomy lost a great researcher and role model, far too early. I will always remember.

Peter Hauschildt
Hamburger Sternwarte

This page was last modified by PHH on 10.11.2020

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