Dr. Wieslaw Z. Wisniewski of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona died suddenly and unexpectedly on February 28, 1994 at 62 years of age. He is survived by his wife and adult son who both live in Tucson. Born on May 2, 1931 in Poland, Wisniewski endured many hardships while surviving the Nazi occupation of Poland as a young boy, and later during the communist regime there.
Obituaries for Olin Wilson, a leading researcher in stellar spectroscopy for more than forty years on the staff of the Hale Observatories in Pasadena, will appear in the January, 1995 issue of Pub. Astron. Soc. Pacific and in Biographical Memoirs of the Natl. Acad. Sciences.
Balfour S. Whitney, Professor Emeritus of the University of Oklahoma, who taught astronomy and conducted research at the university from 1940 to 1969, died of heart failure on September 18, 1992. At that time he lived at the home of his daughter, Natalie Raab, in Minnesota.
Sheridan A. Simon, Jefferson-Pilot Professor of Physics at Guilford College, Greensboro, NC, died on April 8, 1994 after a short but intense battle with cancer. In his living, and in his dying, Sheridan demonstrated how human life can have a point. He did this, in the obvious way, with a myriad of achievements that fill the pages of a curriculum vitae: teaching awards, books and articles of science and science fiction, computer software and imaginary planets; and an expertise in Anglo-Saxon history. But his life had a point both deeper and rarer than this.
Obituaries for Bruno Rossi, a pioneer in the fields of cosmic rays and X-ray astronomy and longtime Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will appear in Quarterly J. Royal Astronomical Soc. and Biographical Memoirs of the Natl. Acad. Sciences.
Franklin E. Roach was born in Jamestown, Michigan, some fifteen miles southwest of Grand Rapids, on September 23, 1905. His father, Richard F. Roach, born on a farm near Grand Rapids, was an optometrist; his mother, Ingeborg "Belle" Torgersen Roach, was a housewife. She had come to America at the age of three, the youngest child in a large immigrant family from Larvik, Norway. In time Franklin had two younger brothers and a younger sister. When he was about five the family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, just west of Chicago and within easy commuting distance of it.
James B. Pollack was born July 9,1938, in New York City. He died June 13, 1994 of Chordoma, a rare form of cancer. His parents, Jeanne and Michael Pollack, ran a family clothing business, Pollack's, that had been in operation since the turn of the century. When Jim was very young, his parents and teachers worried that he might be retarded! Fortunately, according to his sister Ginny Breslauer of Woodmere, N.Y., a psychologist recognized that he thought so fast that his verbalization got in trouble trying to keep up!
Erich Robert Paul, Professor of History of Science and Computer Science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, died October 12, 1994, of cancer. He was most recently the author of The Milky Way Galaxy and Statistical Cosmology, 1890-1924, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and an annotated translation of Henrietta Hertzsprung-Kapteyn's The Life and Works of J.C. Kapteyn (Kluwer, 1993). These detailed studies are important for an understanding of how our present view of the stellar universe developed.
Obituaries for William Morgan, former Director of Yerkes Observatory and a pioneer in understanding stellar populations, will appear in Physics Today, Pub. Astron. Soc. Pacific, and Biographical Memoirs of the Natl. Acad. Sciences.
Karl Gordon Henize, an astronomer, astronaut and then space scientist with NASA,died on October 5, 1993, from high altitude sickness on the slopes of Mount Everest in the course of an effort to climb that peak. In accord with his previously expressed wishes, he was buried on the mountain. Karl was born October 17, 1926, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended primary and secondary schools in Plainville and Mariemont, Ohio. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1947, and a Master of Arts degree in astronomy in 1948 from the University of Virginia.
H. Harold Hartzler was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 7, 1908, and died in Goshen, Indiana, on December 9, 1993. An undergraduate at Juniata College in Huntington, Pennsylvania, he completed his doctorate in physics at Rutgers in 1934 working on the ultraviolet transmission of thin metallic films under the supervision of Robert d'E. Atkinson. He taught mathematics and physics at Goshen College (Indiana) from 1937 to 1958, and was professor of physics and astronomy at Mankato State University (Minnesota) from 1958 to 1976.
An obituary for Hans-Günter Groth, researcher on stellar atmospheres and Professor of Physics at the University of Munich, appeared in Mitteilungen Astronomische Gesellschaft, Nr. 77 (Jahresbericht 1993), pp. 9-10.
Ingemar Karl Furenlid passed away on February 11, 1994, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on leave from Georgia State University. His death at age 59 resulted from brain cancer. Ingemar was known to all stellar spectroscopists, not only from his nine years on the staff of Kitt Peak National Observatory, but also for his diverse and innovative research.
Clinton Banker Ford was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 1, 1913, the son of a successful mathematician and a talented mother. His father, Walter Ford, was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Walter authored several mathematical texts, edited the monthly magazine of the American Mathematical Association, and served a term as AMA President. His mother, Edith Banker Ford, managed a stable and nurturing home in Ann Arbor.
Michael Stewart Fieldus, a Ph.D. student in astronomy at the University of Toronto, died suddenly in Toronto on July 4, 1992. Born in Toronto, Ontario, on October 11, 1962, he was the son of Paul and Beryl Fieldus. He graduated from the University of Toronto, where he captained the swim team, which remained a passionate interest for the rest of his life. While in graduate school, he was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and three University of Toronto Open Fellowships.
Obituaries for John Bolton, winner of the 1968 Henry Norris Russell Prize and leading radio astronomer at the CSIRO Radiophysics Division and California Institute of Technology, have appeared in: (1) Physics Today for April, 1994, (2) Quarterly J. Royal Astronomical Soc., Vol. 35, pp. 225-6 (1994), and (3) J. Astrophys. Astron. (India), Vol. 14, pp. 115-120 (1993).
Arthur Adel died of cancer, September 13, 1994 in Flagstaff, AZ, at age 85. Art was born of immigrant parents November 22, 1908 in Brooklyn, NY, and when they moved to Detroit, he graduated from a technical high school, learning the mechanical arts that later sustained him as one of the country's leading experimental astrophysicists.
Adriaan Wesselink passed away in New Haven after a long illness and a second stroke, on Thursday 12 January 1995. He was born at Hellevoetsluis, then a Dutch naval repair center, on 7 April 1909, the youngest of four children His father was Jan Hendrik Wesselink, a medical practitioner, and his mother, Adriane Marina Nicolete Stok, a surgical nurse, who, after marriage, was, for many years, president of the local welfare board.
In late February 1995 William Wehlau suffered a fatal stroke while in Cape Town attending the Colloquium on Astronomical Applications of Stellar Pulsations. Born on 7 April 1926, he completed his early education in San Francisco before being drafted into the US. infantry in which he served in combat from 1944 to 1946 in the Philippines and later was part of the Army of Occupation in Japan Returning to California he resumed his education, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1953, both from the University of California, Berkeley.
Peter van de Kamp died in suburban Amsterdam on 18 May 1995 at the age of 93, after a long career as an authority in the field of long-focus photographic astrometry. He was born in 1901 in Kampen, a picturesque walled city reminiscent of the days the town was a member of the Hansiatic League, in the north of Holland. Although his father had little education beyond elementary school he was well read, spoke several languages and rose to be an administrator in a local business. He played the organ in church and had a piano in the home.