The pursuit of a dream, Francisco Javier Sayas and the HDG methods

Franciso Javier Sayas, man of grit and determination, left his hometown of Zaragoza in 2007 in pursuit of a dream, to become a scholar in the USA. I hosted him in Minneapolis, where he spent three long years of an arduous transition before obtaining a permanent position at the University of Delaware. There, he enthusiastically worked on the unfolding of his dream until his life was tragically cut short by cancer, at only 50. In this paper, I try to bring to light the part of his academic life he shared with me. As we both worked on hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin methods, and he wrote a book on the subject, I will tell Javier’s life as it developed around this topic. First, I will show how the ideas of static condensation and hybridization, proposed back in the mid 60s, lead to the introduction of those methods. This background material will allow me to tell the story of the evolution of the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin methods and describe Javier’s participation in it. Javier faced death with open eyes and poised dignity. I will end with a poem he liked.