Paul Nelson

Paul Nelson Jr. was born in 1937 to Paul Nelson Sr. and Alberta Swanner Nelson. His younger brother Bill was born a few years later. The family originally lived in Tennessee near the small town of Pulaski but then moved near Huntsville, Alabama.

Throughout his life he was able to remember the sacrifices made on the home front during World War II. His family had to make do without many things including a car.

As a teenager he worked summer jobs baling hay and picking cotton. That helped inspire him to go to college so he could get educated and find a more comfortable job. He was the first in his family to attend college. Since his parents were unfamiliar with the process, he had to figure out how to apply on his own. He went to Auburn University, where he majored in physics. Among the people he knew there was the future astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was portrayed in the movie Apollo 13. He always remembered the two of them playing cards in their dorm.

After graduating in 1958, he became an officer in the U.S. Navy where he served on several assignments including on the USS Wisconsin in the Pacific. He was then assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His fellow naval officers found that to be a surprising assignment since it was so far away from the ocean, but the base always did have a Navy presence. That was where he met his wife of 59 years, Diana Sandoval Nelson, while she was working as a secretary there. They were married in 1964 and had their son Kevin in 1968.

In 1969, after finishing his service in the Navy, he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of New Mexico. He then worked at several jobs, most notably at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, not too far from where he was born. In 1972, the family moved to Lubbock, Texas when he was offered a position in the math department at Texas Tech. He ultimately became the department chairman. The family remained in Lubbock until 1985. It was also during the eighties that he became editor of the technical journal Transport Theory and Statistical Physics. He spent a year in California in a temporary position at the California Institute of Technology and then in 1987 moved to College Station to become a professor at Texas A&M, now with a dual appointment in the Nuclear Engineering and Computer Science departments. That was where he remained for the rest of his career.

Nominally he retired in 2004, but he remained active in the department for as long as his health allowed. He took numerous overseas trips to conferences and for meetings with academics and officials in other countries. Among other places, he visited Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Russia, Estonia, South Africa, Malaysia, Japan, and China. He had a particular interest in India and took multiple trips there, even after his initial diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease in 2010.

Throughout his career, he taught many classes and supervised many graduate students, many of whom went on to highly successful academic careers of their own. He was always very interested in learning about what they were doing and was happy to give them any advice whenever they were interested. He also recruited multiple new faculty members to Texas A&M and helped them get settled in here. He had a very large network of colleagues, some of whom went on to hold positions in official agencies. At the same time, he kept up with his old friends from back in Alabama and enjoyed going to class reunions there.

Because of his long life, many of the people he was close with have now passed away. But he will long be remembered by his professional colleagues, his friends, and his family.