As the son of a cruise ship captain, Dr. Amir Aczel spent his early life traveling, and that experienced informed how he spent all of his 65 years intellectually. He is most famous as the author of “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” the solution of a 300-year-old number theory problem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, but to Science 2.0 readers he was just a smart man who wrote on fascinating subjects, like The Mystery Of The Newly-Discovered Einstein Manuscript: Why Did He Come Back To Lambda? and Why The Higgs Is A Bad Ballerina.

But those were later. Years before that, he had always been supportive of Science 2.0. He was supportive of everyone, really. He liked that we were trying to remake science (with no success) and science media (quite a bit of success) for the 21st century. He encouraged my thoughts on creating a collaboration tool and a model to make the bloated open access model lean with a true Open Publication model, where reviewers get paid and no one has to pay money to publish or to read.

But beating cancer is sometimes the toughest problem of all. He passed away at age 65, his wife recently announced.

He didn't just write science. After being annoyed by an I.R.S. audit (years ago, they were mean to everyone, not just Republicans) he showed how to avoid an audit, work that has been duplicated by many others since. 

You can read his articles here. He would probably have liked that more than mourning him.

Sail on, Dr. Aczel.