On February 27 j.l. after a relatively short illness at an age of 79 Gerard Fleer passed away.
Gerard was born during the second world war in Overdinkel a small town in the east of the Netherlands, as a son of a simple textile worker. In this setting it was far from trivial that he could possibly have an academic carrier, but his father did all he could and Gerard took his chances. He studied chemistry in Utrecht and did his PhD with prof. Hans Lyklema at Wageningen University. During a rather unsuccessful postdoc at NIST in the USA, he met Ed DiMarzio who introduced him to the Gambler’s Ruin problems. When Gerard return to Wageningen (the Netherlands) he was appointed as a research scientist in the laboratory of physical and colloid science of the agriculatural university (nowadays called Wageningen University). One of his first master students, Jan Scheutjens, was given the task to bring excluded-volume effects in the matrix method of DiMarzio. Unaware of, e.g., the Edwards equation, no prior knowledge about density functional theory, Jan single handedly came up with what later was coined the Scheutjens Fleer Self-consistent field approach (SF-SCF) or simply the Scheutjens-Fleer theory. From then on, Gerard Fleer worked centered around ‘polymers at interfaces’. Together with Cohen Stuart, Scheutjens, Cosgrove and Vincent he wrote a book on this topic in 1993. Over the years he teamed up with the Russian school of polymer physics and generated impact on topics such as polymer brushes and depletion flocculation. In 2009 he received the Overbeek medal for his oeuvre. In recent years he lived a quiet retired life with his wife Betsy. We will remember Gerard Fleer not only as a strong teacher and scientist but importantly as an honest and involved person.