years, he worked with his students and colleagues to develop a "two-fluid model of town traffic," a description of vehicular traffic on urban road networks, an extension of the theory that he formulated with Prigogine some years before. This theory, along with his earlier work, has been significant in the development of the now-emerging Intelligent Transportation Systems concept. In 1979, Herman joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment as professor of physics, in the Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics, and the L.P. Gilvin Professor in Civil Engineering. He later became the L.P. Gilvin Centennial Professor Emeritus in Civil Engineering. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. In his spare time, Herman was known to ponder the physics of musical instruments, such as the mechanics of a cello bow and the acoustics of the English flute. He played and collected antique cellos. In the mid 1980s, he began creating small sculptures from exotic woods and metals. For the next decade, he pursued this creative and meaningful quest to find the least-mediated, least-quantifiable relation between matter and the imagination. An exhibition of several of his carvings was presented at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C., in 1994, at the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, and at the Leu Art Gallery of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1996. During the last several years of his life, Herman grew increasingly concerned about the state of education in the United States, the changing yet increasingly critical role of the university in society, the increasing encroachment of political considerations on the education and research enterprise, the constant attacks on academic freedom, and the continuing erosion of the base upon which the nation's great achievements in science and technology have been attained. In his last two years, he busily compiled and analyzed data on all sorts of performance indicators of quality and productivity of university departments. This was part of a broader effort to model universities as complex systems. Herman died in Austin, Texas, on February 13, 1997. References External links Oral History interview transcript for Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman on 12 August 1983, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives Memorial article by R.S. Schechter In Memoriam: Robert Herman by a colleague Denos Gazis Biography of Robert