Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

AROUND THE QUADS

In Memoriam

DEVONS: Emeritus professor of physics Samuel Devons, who combined research in nuclear physics with a career-long effort to make science accessible to general audiences, died on December 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

In the 1960s, while he chaired the physics department, Devons and others conducted experiments that shed light on the nature of the atom's nucleus. As a historian of science, Devons wrote and spoke about the experiments of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Sir J.J. Thomson, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1906 and was one of Devons' teachers at Cambridge University.

Devons was born in Wales and received an undergraduate degree and doctorate from Trinity College, Cambridge. After working on radar and defense projects for the British government, he taught physics at the Imperial College of the University of London. From 1955-60, Devons was a professor of physics at the University of Man­­chester. He then moved to Col­umbia, where he chaired the physics department from 1963-67. He retired in 1984.

FRIEDMAN: Milton Friedman '46 GSAS, a 1976 Nobel Prize winner in economics, died on November 16. He was 94. In more than a dozen books and in his 1966-83 column in Newsweek, Friedman championed individual freedom in economics and politics. His theory of monetarism, which holds that business cycles are determined primarily by money supply and interest rates rather than government fiscal policy, was adopted in part by the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Outspoken and controversial, Friedman and his theories were attacked by many traditional economists such as Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith.

Friedman graduated from Rutgers in 1932 and earned his master's the following year at the University of Chicago. After receiving his Ph.D. in economics from GSAS, Friedman taught at the University of Minne­sota, then returned to teach at Chicago, the institution with which he and the monetarist school are most closely identified, and worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He returned to Columbia as a visiting research professor in 1964-65, leaving to rejoin Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1977. That year he became a senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

LIPSET: Seymour Martin Lipset, who ignored family pressure to be a dentist and instead became a pre-eminent sociologist, political scientist and incisive theorist on American uniqueness, died on December 31 in Arlington, Va. He was 84. Lipset held prestigious academic positions at Columbia, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, George Mason, the Hoover Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He was the only person to be president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next