The following resolution is to be presented at the faculty senate meeting on February 17th:
MEMORIAL RESOLUTION FOR ALAN T. WATERMAN (1918-2008)
Prepared by Don Carpenter, Donald Cox, Dan Stober, and Tony Fraser-Smith
Alan Waterman, scientist, advisor to students, outdoorsman, lifelong athlete, passed away on January 9, 2008 at the age of 89. Notable as a pioneering investigator of radio propagation in the earth’s atmosphere and for a teaching career at Stanford that spanned some 31 years, he was also known for his accomplishments as a mountain climber and as a lifelong athletic competitor.
Alan was born in 1918 in Northampton, Mass. As a youngster he took long canoe trips with his father and younger brothers. His father, a Yale physicist, was the chief scientist of the Office of Naval Research after World War II and was then chosen by President Truman to become the first director of the National Science Foundation.
The younger Waterman majored in Physics at Princeton and was a letterman on the Princeton track team. He graduated in 1939 and then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he earned another bachelor's degree and during the wartime years 1942-46 investigated the effects on radio propagation of turbulence and layers in the Earth’s atmosphere. Alan then attended Harvard, where his Ph.D. thesis, completed in 1952, was entitled “Ionospheric Absorption of Obliquely Incident Radio Waves.” In 1952 he obtained a Research Associate position in the Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford and in 1958 received the faculty appointment in Electrical Engineering that he held until becoming emeritus in 1983.
At Stanford Alan established a research program on various aspects of trans-horizon signal propagation, employing antenna arrays in the Dish area behind Stanford. In the early years his research focused on the direct problem of measuring the properties of waves reflected from or transmitted through the complex atmospheric medium, and in the later years moved to the difficult inverse problem of using the properties of received scattered and transmitted signals to infer the structure and dynamics of the atmospheric medium through which they had passed. In the course of this work Alan served as author or coauthor of 31 papers and reviews that appeared in the Proceedings of the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers), in the IRE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and in the Journal Radioscience.
Alan accomplished much as an advisor and teacher of students. He contributed substantially to the development and teaching of graduate and undergraduate courses in electromagnetic theory and wave propagation. Among his Ph.D. students were several who went on to distinguished research and teaching careers in major universities such as Dartmouth and Stanford. Alan was elected a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) in 1965.
After becoming emeritus in 1983, Alan was regularly recalled to active duty in the EE department, both for the purpose of teaching his favorite courses on electromagnetism and radio propagation and for serving in the important role of advisor to freshman and sophomore undergraduates. He was an advisor to the IEEE student organization and in 1991 was cited by the EE department for his exceptional service “in teaching, research, and advising.”
Alan was involved in a number of professional activities outside the university. He was an active member of the IRE/IEEE, served for years on the U.S. National Committee of the International Radioscience Union (U.R.S.I.), and from 1978 to 1981 was Chair of one of the U.R.S.I. international committees. From 1988 to 1990 he served as editor of the journal Radioscience published by the American Geophysical Union.
Alan served on a number of advisory panels of the National Academy of Sciences and as a consultant to various organizations. In 1982 he was invited to visit the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy for discussions and study of the problem of wave scattering from non-ionized air. He was a member of a number of societies devoted to scholarship, including the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association of University Professors.
Alan’s work on radio probing of the Earth’s atmosphere, including trans-horizon radio propagation, brought him research support from the Defense Department, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s made him a target for campus protests against military-sponsored research. Waterman stoutly defended his defense contracts at an Academic Council hearing and in letters to the editor of the Stanford Daily. “He stuck to the line that what he was doing was basic research, though it had applications in all sort of fields,” said Dane Waterman, one of Al’s two sons. Alan became involved in the celebrated case of Associate Professor H. Bruce Franklin involving an incident at the campus computer center in 1971, testifying against Franklin before a faculty advisory board. In the aftermath of that turbulent period the university pulled away from classified defense contracts, and as his research funding ebbed Waterman shifted his attention from research to teaching and raising his children.
Alan met his wife, Lori, in New York City on VE Day in 1945. Lori and he were married for 54 years, until her death in 2001. They loved traveling together; an artist, she would sketch the landscape while he went rock climbing.
Waterman loved mountain climbing and was reputed by a family member to have “climbed basically anything south of Alaska in the Americas,” including peaks in the Andes. In 1997, when he went to Colorado to climb with other Princeton alumni, he was the oldest climber there.
Running was another of Waterman's passions. Sometime around 1964 he helped form the Angell Field Ancients (AFA), a group of Stanford and community runners who gathered at noon at Stanford’s Angell field track. He was an early recipient of the AFA Golden Jock award, presented annually to an AFA member in recognition of having achieved distinction within the group, however modest. He enthusiastically supported his fellow runners, helping pace them through time trials and inviting colleagues attending a conference in a foreign city to join him in exploratory runs. Noted for his exceptionally smooth running style, strength, and balance, Alan in his 50s could still run a mile in less than five minutes. Family members said he once held a national steeplechase record for runners 55 and older.
In the final years of his life Al suffered greatly from osteoporosis, making it increasingly difficult for him to be physically active. He welcomed visitors most warmly and from time to time was able to attend functions on the campus. He did his best to go to major track meets, but in his last years was forced to give that up with regret.
He was a guitarist and cellist who loved opera, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and folk songs, especially old Scottish ballads.
Al remained mentally alert to the end. In the last two weeks of his life he was still reciting from memory his favorite passages from Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley and Wordsworth, his daughter-in-law said. “Two days before he died, he asked that my two girls come to the hospital and sing him some Gilbert and Sullivan,” she said.
Al was a quiet, gentle man who was much respected by his colleagues and was particularly loved by those who were privileged to share in his lifelong enthusiasms for the outdoors and for track and field.