Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Roland Zdenek Bulirsch was born in 1932 in Reichenberg/Böhmen (today Liberec in the Czech Republic). He was forcibly "resettled" in 1946 and came to Bavaria. One year later, he began an apprenticeship as a machinist at Siemens-Schuckert in Nuremberg, which he completed in 1951 with the journeyman's examination. In 1954, he took the Abitur at the Oberrealschule in Nördlingen and then began studying mathematics and physics at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, graduating in 1959. In 1961, he received his doctorate with a topic set by Prof. Klaus Samelson, followed by his habilitation in mathematics in 1965. 1967, he became Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego, which appointed him Full Professor in 1968. However, he went to the University of Cologne as Full Professor of Applied Mathematics and in 1973 back to the Technical University of Munich as Full Professor of Higher and Numerical Mathematics. There he was appointed to the chair of Prof. Friedrich Ludwig Bauer, who moved to a chair of computer science. Prof. Bulirsch was a visiting professor in San Diego for many years.
In 1991, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences elected him as its full member, and in 1998 he took over the chair of the Commission for the Publication of the Works of Johannes Kepler. Prof. Bulirsch was also an affiliate member of the Department of Informatics at TUM, founded in 1967. Until his retirement in 2002, he had rendered many services to TUM and in particular to the Departments of Mathematics and Informatics. He was a member of the TUM Senate and twice Dean of the Department of Mathematics. Prof. Bulirsch was the driving force behind the establishment of the diploma course in Technomathematics. He can be described as one of the founding fathers of numerical mathematics in Germany, whose two-volume textbook "Stoer/Bulirsch: Numerische Mathematik" was a standard work for decades. Prof. Bulirsch has received many awards for his scientific achievements, such as honorary doctorates from the University of Hamburg, the Technical University in Liberec, the Technical University of Athens and the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi. In 1998, he became a member of the Bavarian Order of Maximilian for Science and Art. This extraordinary award of the Free State of Bavaria is reserved for only 100 living recipients of the order at a time.
For many contemporaries, Prof. Bulirsch embodied the ideal of a mathematician: he could explain even the most complicated things simply. According to Prof. F. L. Bauer and Prof. Arndt Bode, he was neither a pure nor an applied mathematician. He was a holistic mathematician, which also included an interest in neighbouring fields, such as computer science and astronomy. His engineering-oriented understanding of applied mathematics contributed to the fact that the optimal control of differential equation systems is now an integral part of industrial research and development. Other contemporaries regarded him as a creative and refreshingly unconventional scientist, as well as an inspiring academic teacher whose cohort of students shaped a generation of brilliant mathematicians. In his obituary, Bavarian Minister-President Dr. Markus Söder described Prof. Bulirsch as a "promoter of worldwide cooperation who enriched the scientific state of Bavaria as a researcher, author and academic teacher". On 21 September 2022, the highly esteemed emeritus professor passed away in his hometown of Gauting in the district of Starnberg.