Today, October 29, 2021, we lost a quiet giant of the dielectric community. Many people will remember Alex Puzenko from our biannual IDS conferences. Few will have remembered him talking. But all have heard his wisdom. He was instrumental in the theoretical development of dielectric science. He was also a gentle and often unassuming man, willing for others to present his work, content in the knowledge he had produced. He came to Jerusalem in 1995. Through Fate’s good grace he landed up in the Applied Physics department of the Hebrew University in the office of Yuri Feldman and he got the support of Israeli Government program for immigrant scientists. There, began one of the most fruitful partnerships in our community. His first major contribution was in percolation. He linked the power and stretch function to the fractal geometry of microemulsion, demonstrated how dynamic and static percolation would manifest in a dielectric response and explain what the parameters of the power and stretch response function, n and m, would mean. One of his powers was the ability to stimulate others and to grant intellectual manna to those students lucky enough to work with him. Many will mourn his loss today. He then turned his mind to the Cole-Cole equation adding meaning to the dependence of the broadening parameter, a, on the relaxation time, t. He then incorporated Froelich’s B function to this description to invent a new way of tracing the evolution of relaxation process through a new parametric space (a, ln(t) and ln(B)). His other contributions were manifold. He was instrumental in tutoring a new generation of theoreticians in dielectric science. He was ever supportive of the experimentalists who turned to him to illuminate the conundrums they encountered. All this he did quietly, with dignity and with a smile. Many of us will remember his gentle nature in our group celebrations. Always one with hearty toast and a good word. He will be missed.
He is survived by his wife Sonya and his sons Sergey and Yuri. We, the members of the Dielectric group, past and present, will always remember him.
Dr. Paul Ben Ishai,
IDS Board member, Israel
