Jonathan Dowling (1955-2020)

He was a brilliant professor with very distinctive humour, always dishing out the memorable stories. He will be missed by the quantum optics community.

I had dinner with him and Wilde the day before the Hearne Lecture Aaronson gave as I was visiting LSU with some other grad students from Tulane. He ribbed me for talking like faculty. It's a great loss for science, the state, and the country.

Met Professor Jon Dowling in Sydney (Australia) through our mutual friend and collaborator Dr Peter Rohde. I fondly recall going to an underground whisky bar—with a retinue of postdocs and a couple of academics—with Jon regaling us with stories, and buying us all the whisky ! – Was even able to selfishly take him aside to talk nonlinear optics and my own research topics, which he gave expert insights into (and we later had some back-and-forth over online).

Really sad to hear of his passing. He will surely be missed.

Thanks for posting this Professor Scott Aaronson—and as we say—wish his family long-life.

Jon was a jewel. He ran a quantum computing group of about a dozen people at the Jet Propulsion Lab that was next to my own group in the organization. Eventually the NASA funding in that area got too tight and the group disbanded.

Jon's group members were incredibly prolific article publishers, which always caused considerable foot-shuffling when the annual ranking (back in the day, a stack ranking, 1 thru N) was done. It was not much fun to be ranking our own group members against Jon Dowling or Colin Williams.

Our weekly meetings with those one level up in the hierarchy were a major snooze ... unless Jon was there. The dour manager could barely progress through the agenda between Jon's wisecracks and asides. (And the manager was powerless to clamp down on it because Jon was charming and a top contributor at the same time.) Nothing got done at that meeting either way, but Jon made it a lot more fun.

His talk on Quantum Sensing a couple of years ago is a great presentation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNV_CzCeA0 ... RIP, irreplaceable.

Shocking - just a week ago he was posting like nothing was up.

I know it's traditional to not talk about the cause of death, but -- was it Coronavirus?