Richard “Dick” Miller, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College, and the namesake of the Miller Instability, passed away March 7, 2020. He was 93.
Prof. Miller was an early pioneer in numerical simulations of structure formation and galactic dynamics. The Miller Instability related to chaos in n-body systems is named after his work on the subject.
Prof. Miller retired in 1996. Miller's research has dealt with a variety of topics. His early work focused on photometry of galaxies and the interpretation of results in stellar dynamical terms. A shift to n-body computational methods led to the discovery that the gravitational n-body problem is chaotic. In 1966, he proposed the design and construction of a large Michelson Stellar Interferometer with a 1-km baseline. He pioneered n-body computations with large numbers of particles (100 000) and the use of motion pictures to present and study the results. He developed the first n-body computation that showed spiral structure in a disk galaxy model (1970).