Sad news for theoretical ecology: on Jan 19th, Richard Levins died in Cambridge, MA. He was 85 years old.

His work has always been my main source of inspiration. I got to read some of his articles in college, when Antonio Bodini—who was then to become my PhD avisor—introduced Loop Analysis in a class on Environmental Impact Assessment. I immediately loved the simplicity, elegance, and power of this method, and I worked on it for my honors thesis (with Alessandro Zaccagnini and Antonio Bodini).

During my PhD years, I’ve read more of his work, including the wonderful (yet almost impossible to find) book with Charles Puccia, and the celebrated articles “The strategy of model building in population biology” and “Evolution in communities near equilibrium”.

All my work on stability, random matrices, and population dynamics has been inspired by Loop Analysis, and even today when I see a matrix, I actually see a composition of loops and paths.

Even the fact I am now in Chicago is somewhat influenced by Levins: he and Lewontin were professors here in the 1960s, and that’s why when I saw the ad for the position in Ecology & Evolution, I immediately felt I had to apply—this is my kind of Department!

There’s a nice picture of Levins in the Lillie Room downstairs: you can see him in his prime, explaining Loop Analysis on the board. That’s the way I want to remember him.