James M. Burns, a Scholar of Presidents and Leadership

James MacGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and political scientist who wrote voluminously about the nature of leadership in general and the presidency in particular, died on Tuesday at his home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 95. The historian Michael Beschloss, a friend and former student, confirmed the death.

Mr. Burns, who taught at Williams College for most of the last half of the 20th century, was the author of more than 20 books, most notably “Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom” (1970), a major study of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stewardship of the country through World War II. It was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

An informal adviser to presidents, Mr. Burns was a liberal Democrat who once ran for Congress from the westernmost district of Massachusetts. Though he sometimes wrote prescriptively from — or for — the left, over all he managed the neat trick of neither hiding his political viewpoint in his work nor funneling his work through it. His work was often critical of American government and its system of checks and balances, which in his view was an obstacle to visionary progress, particularly as a rein on the presidency. In works like “The Deadlock of Democracy” (1963) and “Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court” (2009), he argued for systemic changes, calling for a population-based Senate, term limits for Supreme Court justices and an end to midterm elections.

In 1978, after a half-dozen more books, including the second Roosevelt volume and separate studies of the presidency and of state and local governments, Mr. Burns wrote “Leadership,” an amalgamation of a lifetime of thinking about the qualities shared and exemplified by world leaders throughout history. It became a standard academic text in the emerging discipline known as leadership studies, and Mr. Burns’s concept of transforming leadership itself became the subject of hundreds of doctoral theses.

Asked to describe Mr. Burns’s passions away from his writing, Ms. Sorenson named skiing, his two golden retrievers, Jefferson and Roosevelt, the blueberry patch in his yard and his students.

“He would never bump a student appointment to meet with someone more important,” Ms. Sorenson said. “I remember Hillary Clinton once inviting him to tea, and he wouldn’t go because he had to meet with a student. And he would never leave his place in Williamstown during blueberry season.”

Ride, Sally, ride

Sally Ride: 1951-2012:American Woman Who Shattered Space Ceiling

Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978 after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984. At 32, she was also the youngest American in space. She later became the only person to sit on both panels investigating the catastrophic shuttle accidents that killed all astronauts on board — the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia crash in 2003.

Dr. Ride was finishing studies at Stanford University — she had degrees in physics and astrophysics (and also English) — and looking for a job when she saw NASA’s advertisement. She looked at the qualifications and said, “I’m one of those people,” she told The New York Times in 1982. She applied, and made the cut. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said.

How many other astronauts have degrees in English?

She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers. 

Dr. Ride told interviewers that what drove her was not the desire to become famous or to make history as the first woman in space. All she wanted to do was fly, she said, to soar into space, float around weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and gaze back at Earth. In photographs of her afloat in the spaceship, she was grinning, as if she had at long last reached the place she was meant to be.

Ride, Sally, ride.

Jeffrey Zaslow

McLean & Eakin Booksellers - Jeffrey Zaslow giving his last lecture Thursday night in Michigan.


Jeffrey Zaslow, a longtime Wall Street Journal writer and best-selling author with a rare gift for writing about love, loss, and other life passages with humor and empathy, died at age 53 on Friday of injuries suffered in a car crash in northern Michigan. He died after losing control of his car while driving on a snowy road and colliding with a truck, according to his wife and the Antrim County Sheriff's Office. The condition of the truck driver wasn't available.


In addition to writing hundreds of memorable Journal articles and columns, Mr. Zaslow did a long stint as an advice columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, succeeding Ann Landers—a job he won after he entered a competition for the position as an angle for  a Journal front-page feature.

At the Journal his subjects ranged from the anguish of losing a car in the Disney World parking lot, to the power of fathers' lunchbox letters to their daughters, to the distinctive pain of watching a beloved childhood stadium go under the wrecking ball.

More recently, he became one of America's best-selling nonfiction writers, known internationally for such books as "The Girls from Ames," the story of a 40-year friendship among 10 women, and "The Last Lecture," about Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor who in 2007 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only a few months to live.

After Mr. Pausch gave an inspirational multimedia presentation about his life's lessons, Mr. Zaslow—a 1980 Carnegie Mellon graduate—wrote a Journal column about the lecture and posted it on the Journal's website with a video that became an online sensation. The resulting book spent more than a year on best-seller lists and was translated into dozens of languages.

I distinctly remember reading that column in the newspaper, back in the days when I read the physical paper (and when I had a subscription to it, before the tragedy - well, not tragedy; his death is a tragedy - the misfortune of Murdoch buying the paper).

The newspaper article that probably had the greatest impact on Mr. Zaslow’s own life was one he wrote in 1987 about a contest The Chicago Sun-Times was holding to fill the job left vacant when its advice columnist, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), de-camped for a competitor, The Chicago Tribune.

Mr. Zaslow, who was then a feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, entered the contest for the fun of it. And he won. In an interview with The New York Times, he said some people thought he was underqualified. “How could you have the audacity to give advice?,” people scolded him, he said. “My reply: ‘I’m 28, but I have the wisdom of a 29-year-old.’ ” He wrote the advice column, “All That Zazz,” until 2001. His annual singles party for charity, Zazz Bash, drew 7,000 readers a year and resulted in 78 marriages.

Iconoclastic head of Brooklyn school

As the founding headmaster of Saint Ann’s, Mr. Bosworth envisioned an academically rigorous school for the gifted, from pre-school through high school, with no grades and few rules. Along with standard courses like Shakespeare and Chinese, there are puppetry classes. For years, the school had a smoking lounge for students. Its own literature calls the place an “amusement park” whose attractions were Aristophanes, Darwin and Baudelaire.

Why no grades? “How do you give a grade on an oboe’s sweet, beautiful sound?” Mr. Bosworth said in an interview with New York magazine in 2004 after announcing he would retire at 76. That article, titled “The Devil and Saint Ann’s,” illustrated Mr. Bosworth’s penchant for pungent, provocative commentary. In it, he told parents not to worry about students sleeping together. “If they’re affectionate, they’re affectionate!” he said.


Mr. Bosworth could be paradoxical in a single phrase, as when he said he was really the person he pretended to be. But when asked if he found anything satisfying about getting older, he was unmistakably straightforward. “I have the satisfaction of seeing people I hate die!” he said.

Proved Continental Drift

It is my considered opinion that one can learn a great deal from obituaries, they being a sort of clearinghouse of people of disparate disciplines and walks of life. This is a perfect example.


Jack Oliver, whose studies of earthquakes provided convincing proof that Earth’s continents are constantly moving, died last Wednesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 87. The idea of continental drift, that Earth’s crust is slowly shifting and moving, had been proposed by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but most of the scientific community regarded it with skepticism and often derision through much of the 20th century.

In 1968, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Isacks and another former graduate student of Dr. Oliver, Lynn Sykes, wrote a paper, “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” that put together earthquake evidence from around the world that made a convincing case that continental drift — now called plate tectonics — was indeed occurring.

John Ertle Oliver was born Sept. 26, 1923, in Massillon, Ohio. In high school, he played on Massillon’s championship football team, which was coached by Paul Brown, who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach of the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League.  



In his 1998 autobiography, “Shakespeare Got It Wrong: It’s Not ‘to Be,’ It’s ‘to Do,’ ” Dr. Oliver indulged in a fondness for limericks, interspersing them between chapters. Here is one:
The youth wondered what he should be.
His prof said, “You’re missing the key.
Life’s not to be, but to do.
Pick a task, follow through.
You’ll live ever after most happily.”

Legendary coach

Rich Clarkson/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images - John Wooden won 10 national championships as coach of the U.C.L.A. Bruins, and is often considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history. More Photos »

June 4, 2010
John Wooden, Who Built Incomparable Dynasty at U.C.L.A., Dies at 99
By FRANK LITSKY and JOHN BRANCH

Correction Appended

John Wooden, a staid Midwesterner who migrated to U.C.L.A. and became college basketball’s most successful coach, earning the nickname the Wizard of Westwood and an enduring place in sports history, died Friday at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since May 26. He was 99. His death was announced by the university. Wooden created a sports dynasty against which all others are compared, and usually pale. His teams at U.C.L.A. won 10 national championships in a 12-season stretch from 1964 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, U.C.L.A. won 88 consecutive games, still the N.C.A.A. record. Four of Wooden’s teams finished with 30-0 records, including his first championship team, which featured no starters taller than 6 feet 5 inches.

Three of his other championship teams were anchored by the 7-foot-2 center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Two others were led by center Bill Walton, a three-time national player of the year.

Wooden retired after U.C.L.A.’s 1975 championship victory over Kentucky. A slight man hugely popular for his winning record and his understated approach, he ultimately became viewed as a kind of sage for both basketball and life, a symbol of both excellence and simpler times. Even in retirement he remained a beloved figure and a constant presence at U.C.L.A., watching most games from a seat behind the home bench at Pauley Pavilion. Lines of well-wishers and autograph-seekers often snaked their way to his seat in Section 103B. Wooden always obliged his fans, until the university and his family requested that he be granted privacy in January 2008, when he was 97.

Slide Show

John Wooden’s Career

A dynasty like Wooden’s would be almost impossible now, because the best players seldom spend more than a year or two in college before turning professional. No N.C.A.A. men’s basketball coach has won more than four championships since Wooden retired. Of Wooden’s eight coaching successors at U.C.L.A., only one — Jim Harrick in 1995 — won an N.C.A.A. championship with the Bruins, who have managed to retain an air of the elite among basketball programs largely on Wooden’s legacy.

Wooden’s success fed upon itself. When he won his first two national championships, landed Alcindor and moved home games to the new Pauley Pavilion, high school stars begged to play for him. Besides Abdul-Jabbar and Walton, Wooden turned out celebrated players like Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, Henry Bibby, Lucius Allen, Sidney Wicks, Jamaal Wilkes and Marques Johnson.

“He was almost a mystical figure by the time I got to U.C.L.A.,” said Johnson, a starter on Wooden’s final team. “I couldn’t really sit down and have a conversation with him about real things just because I had so much reverence for him — for who he was and what he had accomplished.” Johnson added, “He never gave that perception that that was the way he wanted you to treat him, but it was just how it was.” Johnson, like many of Wooden’s players, grew closer to the coach in the decades after Wooden retired and visited him often.

In his autobiography, “Giant Steps” (Bantam, 1983), Abdul-Jabbar recalled his first meeting with Wooden. “Coach Wooden’s office was about the size of a walk-in closet,” he wrote. “I was brought in, and there was this very quaint-looking Midwesterner. I’d heard a lot about this man and his basketball wisdom, but he surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse.”

He continued: “I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis, and that decision endeared him to me even more. It was at once formal, my full name. I was no baby Lewie. Lewis. I liked that.”

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read: “Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

Wooden said he lived by that creed, and few players tested him. One who did was Walton, a gifted 6-foot-11 center with flowing red hair who went on to play for 10 seasons in the N.B.A. At the start of Walton’s senior season, in 1973, his U.C.L.A. teams had won 75 consecutive games and 2 N.C.A.A. titles. But when Wooden walked into the locker room before the first practice and saw Walton’s just-trimmed but still long hair, he said: “Bill, that’s not short enough. We’re sure going to miss you on this team. Get on out of here.” Walton jumped onto his bicycle, raced back to the barber shop where his hair had been trimmed the day before, got his head almost shaved and rode back. He made the last half-hour of practice.

During the Vietnam War era, Wooden’s young players, including Walton, asked permission to stage an antiwar protest. “He asked us if this reflected our convictions,” one player, Steve Patterson, told Sports Illustrated in 1989, “and we told him it did. He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at U.C.L.A.”

In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Wooden said his coaching philosophy revolved around three main ideals. One was to get his players “in the best possible condition.” Another was “quickness.”

“I wanted my centers to be quicker than the opposing centers, the forwards quicker than their forwards, and so on,” he explained.

The third was teamwork: “You better play together as a team or you sit.”

“People ask me if I’d permit fancy things, like dunks,” Wooden said. “Well, if they did dunk, it was with no fancy flair. No behind-the-back dribbles or passes unless necessary. If it was for show, you were on the bench.”

John Robert Wooden was born into a Dutch-Irish family on Oct. 14, 1910, in Hall, Ind., and grew up in a farmhouse that had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Before his sophomore year in high school, when his father, Joshua, and his mother, Roxie, lost the farm, he and his three brothers moved to Martinsville, 8 miles away and 30 miles south of Indianapolis. His first basketball was a black cotton sock his mother had stuffed with rags. The hoop was a tomato basket until his father forged a rim from the rings of a barrel.

Wooden later led Martinsville High School to three consecutive state finals, winning in 1927. Playing the cornet in the school band at the time was Nellie Riley, a classmate. They were inseparable from then on; their marriage lasted 53 years, until her death in 1985.

Wooden went to Purdue University, even though it had no athletic scholarships. To get tuition money, he spent summers doing construction work.

At Purdue he was a basketball all-American, a 5-foot-10, 175-pound guard and team captain. In 1932, he led Purdue to the Helms Foundation’s unofficial national championship and was named national player of the year. An English major, he also had the highest grade-point average of any Purdue athlete that year. He earned a teaching degree and taught at Dayton High School in Dayton, Ky., where he also coached almost everything, including tennis and baseball. Two years later he moved back to Indiana, to South Bend Central High School, where for nine years he taught English and coached basketball. In his 11 years as a high school basketball coach, his record was 218-42.

From 1943 to 1946, he served in the Navy as a physical education instructor. Afterward, Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State) hired him as athletic director and basketball and baseball coach. In 1948, U.C.L.A. wooed him away as basketball coach for $6,000 a year. His team practiced in a little gymnasium and had to share the court with the wrestling and gymnastics teams.

His success at U.C.L.A, where he perfected a merciless zone defense, brought him a nickname he hated: the Wizard of Westwood, a reference to the Westwood section of Los Angeles, the site of the campus.

Wooden was a religious man whose strongest exclamation was “Goodness gracious sakes alive!” Still, many opposing coaches thought he was not always a saint. Digger Phelps, the longtime Notre Dame coach, once said Wooden rode officials and opposing players more than any other coach. Wooden admitted he was no innocent.

“The thing I may be ashamed of more than anything else is having talked to opposing players,” he said. “Not calling them names, but saying something like ‘Keep your hands off him’ or ‘Don’t be a butcher.’ ”

There was a more serious mark against Wooden and his reign. By the mid-1970s, Sam Gilbert, a team booster, had befriended many U.C.L.A. players. Several said he had given them illegal benefits. According to allegations reported in The Los Angeles Times in 1982, Gilbert provided cars and clothes for U.C.L.A. players and even arranged abortions for their girlfriends at times during the previous 15 years.

“I warned them, but I couldn’t pick their friends,” Wooden told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I honestly felt Sam meant well.”

In December 1981 — more than six years after Wooden coached his last game — the N.C.A.A. placed U.C.L.A.’s basketball program on a two-year probation for violations, some involving Gilbert, although no legal action was taken against him.

Wooden was 64 and his wife was ill when he retired in 1975, saying he had lost desire. He left with a 620-147 record in 27 years at U.C.L.A. and a 40-year head coaching record of 885-203.

He was honored in many places. Martinsville, Ind., where he grew up, has a John R. Wooden Drive and a John R. Wooden Gymnasium at Martinsville High School. A college basketball player-of-the-year award is named for him. The midseason John R. Wooden Classic features leading college teams. He was the first person elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach. In 2003, U.C.L.A. named its basketball floor the Nell and John Wooden Court.

Ever self-effacing, he declined when U.C.L.A. proposed a ceremony for his 90th birthday. In later years he lived in a modest condominium in Encino, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hip-replacement surgery forced him to give up morning walks. He also needed his knees replaced, and he walked with a cane.

Wooden watched U.C.L.A. on television as it went to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four in 2006, 2007 and 2008. A fall at his home in February 2008 left him with a broken wrist and collarbone. He spent several weeks at a hospital and a rehabilitation center.

For most of his retirement, large crowds flocked to his speeches, usually revolving around his “Pyramid of Success,” 15 conceptual building blocks of traits like industriousness, alertness and poise, held together by faith and patience. In recent years Wooden simply sat in a chair and spoke for up to an hour without notes, hoping to impart his wisdom to newer generations. His former players said they did not appreciate Wooden’s life lessons when they were young, but the precepts stuck with them.

“At the time it was like, ‘Pyramid, shmyramid,’ ” Marques Johnson said. “ ‘Where’s the party at? Where are the girls at?’ I didn’t want to hear anything about principles and living a life of integrity at that time. But as you get older, and you have kids, and you try to pass on life lessons, now it becomes a great learning tool.”

Wooden is survived by a son, James, of Orange County, Calif.; a daughter, Nancy, of Los Angeles; 7 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Wooden always described his job as teacher, not coach. “He broke basketball down to its basic elements,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “He always told us basketball was a simple game, but his ability to make the game simple was part of his genius.”

Abdul-Jabbar recalled that there “was no ranting and raving, no histrionics or theatrics.” He continued: “To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.

“In essence,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded, “he was preparing us for life.”

Correction: June 5, 2010

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Encino. It is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles; it does not lie outside of it.

Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS

A former Navy nuclear engineer, Michael Jordan set new courses for two of the largest companies in the country. Mr. Jordan, who died Tuesday at age 73, was a top PepsiCo Inc. executive before he transformed Westinghouse Electric Corp. in the mid-1990s from a foundering industrial giant into a leading media company. He renamed it CBS Corp. after acquiring the Tiffany network. And coaxed from retirement in 2003, Mr. Jordan led a turnaround at Electronic Data Systems Inc., an information-technology giant. In each case, the company he had led was sold once he had reshaped it. CBS Corp. went to Viacom in a 2000 deal valued at $44 billion, and EDS to Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2008 for $13.9 billion.

"What I like about a crisis situation is you don't have to pussyfoot around," he told the Dallas Morning News in 2007, shortly before retiring from EDS. "When you step into a mess like this, you just start kicking a—, taking names, and changing things."

That's leadership; we could use some of it now, indeed.

The changes at Westinghouse were profound. When Mr. Jordan was brought in as chief executive in 1993, the venerable manufacturer of consumer goods and defense and nuclear-power equipment was experiencing record losses, largely weighed down by its financial-services subsidiary. Mr. Jordan sold off large parts of the company, then in 1995 surprised analysts when he doubled down on the company's media holdings by acquiring CBS for $5.4 billion in cash. A year later, he acquired Infinity Broadcasting, a national radio giant known for its shock jocks. The transformation of Westinghouse became complete in 1997. He changed its name to CBS and moved the headquarters to New York, ensconcing himself in the office last occupied by the network's builder, William Paley. It had sat empty since Mr. Paley's death in 1990. The office choice was a dramatic gesture for a man whom Fortune had once declared charisma-challenged.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Jordan attended Yale and studied chemical engineering at Princeton. He left before finishing his doctorate to run a soap factory for Procter & Gamble Co. Drafted into the Navy in 1959, he studied nuclear engineering and joined the staff of Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine program.

In 1964, Mr. Jordan joined McKinsey & Co., where his clients included Westinghouse. He joined PepsiCo in the mid-1970s and became CEO of the company's Frito-Lay division. After serving as chief of PepsiCo's overseas operations, Mr. Jordan seemed a possible candidate for chairman of the company, but retired in 1992 to run a private-equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He was lured to run Westinghouse a year later. After stabilizing the company and changing its name to CBS, he declared he would continue as CEO until 2001, when he would be 65. He changed his mind and retired in 1998, amid talk of fights between Mr. Jordan and Mel Karmazin, his deputy and the former CEO of Infinity.

Could use some of this refreshing candor, as well.

"We were not dancing the tango in my office every day," Mr. Jordan told The Wall Street Journal of the two executives' relationship. But he supported Mr. Karmazin for CEO when he told the CBS board of his decision to resign.

Mr. Jordan was renowned for a photographic memory, and liked to write mystery and historical novels in his spare time. None were published. He served on numerous corporate boards, and was chairman of the United Negro College Fund for a decade starting in 1994.

He once appeared in a public service announcement for the fund, alongside another Michael Jordan. The CEO missed shot after shot while the basketball star caught nothing but net.



MAY 27, 2010 - By STEPHEN MILLER
Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS
picture: Electronic Data Systems

Pioneer Meteorologist Peered Into Storms

Joanne Simpson 1923-2010


By STEPHEN MILLER


Joanne Simpson helped show how hurricanes draw their power from warm seas. Armed with that knowledge, she set out to destroy one by sending a payload of silver iodide into the heart of a storm. Ms. Simpson, who died March 4 at age 86, didn't have much success suppressing storms. But her discoveries about the nature of clouds and the formation and dynamics of hurricanes were some of the most significant in 20th century meteorology.

USAToday

Believed to be the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology, Ms. Simpson overcame significant professional barriers for women and become chief scientist for meteorology at NASA's Earth Sciences Directorate.

The daughter of a Boston newspaperman friendly with Charles Lindbergh, Ms. Simpson worked at Boston Airport and became a pilot in her teens. Flying among the clouds spurred her interest in the weather. She won a scholarship to the University of Chicago to study meteorology and taught forecasting to aviators during World War II. She went on to earn a master's degree at Chicago, but the department refused to give her a fellowship to go on for a doctorate, despite high marks.

It is still difficult to comprehend the level of bias built into the system half a century and more; that change is for the better, to scrub bias out of academia.


"They told me it was totally inappropriate for a woman to be a meteorologist," Ms. Simpson told USA Today in 1998. She persevered, teaching to support herself and studying with Swedish meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby. He advised her to concentrate on clouds, then an unpopular topic in the field that he deemed a fitting subject "for a little girl to study."

Imagine: even someone who supported her called her a little girl. A look at his biography does not show her name.

Despite holding a series of prestigious appointments, Ms. Simpson blamed sexism for holding back her career, especially rules against nepotism that prevented her from being hired by the same institutions that employed her first two husbands.In the 1950s, Ms. Simpson worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where she began studying how clouds develop into hurricanes. Her research involved riding in a surplus Navy PBY Catalina "flying boat," often into storms. She developed some of the first mathematical models of clouds, using a slide rule for calculations. Later, she pioneered computers to model weather.

Se pioneered the use of computers. I also found an article from the publication Meteorogical Monographs about her research.


Ms. Simpson's research resulted in what became known as the "hot tower" theory of storm formation, which showed how hurricanes derive energy from heat generated within cumulonimbus clouds that reach to the stratosphere. "This timid-looking blonde is in fact one of the top five meteorologists in the world, and besides her hurricane research runs a big home in Woods Hole, Mass., does all the cooking for her husband and two sons, and is an expert at most sports," the Associated Press reported in a 1958 profile.

But she later contradicted that idyllic portrayal of her personal life, which she said had suffered from her professional activities. After two divorces, she married Robert Simpson, also a meteorologist and later head of the National Hurricane Center. Together, they worked on a joint Navy/Weather Bureau project called Project Stormfury that sought to slow hurricanes by bombing them with silver iodide, used in cloud-seeding. The experiments came to little, though when they seeded Hurricane Beulah in 1963, the storm's eye faded and winds dropped.


Ms. Simpson continued cloud-seeding experiments as director of experimental meteorology for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1979, she moved to NASA, where for the first time in her career she worked with other women scientists.


"This was something new in my career, to find three or four other scientists in the ladies room," she said in the USA Today interview. Bathroom facilities played a surprisingly prominent role in her career, often keeping her off planes that didn't have women's facilities.At NASA, Ms. Simpson undertook what she considered her most ambitious project, directing satellite measurements of rainfall across the tropics. Discoveries from that project have demonstrated how dust and smoke influence rainfall, and also how Atlantic hurricanes are born.


Ms. Simpson didn't quite achieve her goal of never retiring, but she used retirement to take a swipe at global-warming theorists, whose dire predictions she felt were over-reliant on computer models.


"We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system," she wrote in a conference paper in 2008. "We only need to watch the weather forecasts."

Remembrances - Wall Street Journal March 12, 2010

the finest Greek scholar of his generation

British somehow seem to outdo USers with the spice of their obituaries: how they're written, and those that they are written about. Case in point, this one of Kenneth Dover. A few things caught my eye, beginning with the photograph.

Dover as Chancellor of St Andrews University presenting Bob Dylan with an honorary degree in 2004 Photo: PA 


Sir Kenneth Dover, who died on March 7 aged 89, was considered the finest Greek scholar of his generation and seemed to have led a life of almost oppressive decorum, crowned in 1978 by his election as President of the British Academy.

Published: 6:25PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

But in 1994 he published an autobiography, Marginal Comment, which deliberately shattered the image. The book portrayed a spikily intelligent man who was slave to an urge to demonstrate his emancipation from bourgeois constraints. The reader is not spared the least detail of Dover's sex life, right down to the culminating horror that at 64 he and his wife enjoyed "some of the best ----- of our life". But the issue which caught the headlines was his account of his attitude to Trevor Aston, a History fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where Dover had been President between 1976 and 1986. Aston's disintegration into paranoia and alcoholism had proved a serious embarrassment to the college; Dover confessed to having thought long and hard about how to murder him.

"It was clear to me," wrote Dover, "that Trevor and the College must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candour: how to kill him without getting into trouble." In fact, as the text reveals, Dover acted impeccably towards Aston, who was bent on self-destruction and eventually committed suicide. What was less clear is why the author should have been the victim of an adolescent desire to shock. But that was to misunderstand Dover's almost brutal passion for honesty. When he was interviewed on radio by the psychiatrist Anthony Clare shortly after the book's publication, it became obvious that Clare had never met anyone with such a commitment to telling the truth about himself, however discreditable; indeed, so disoriented was Clare by the encounter that towards the end it seemed as if Dover was the one doing the interviewing.

This passion for honesty, especially on sexual matters, was to inform Dover's whole career and cause him considerable trouble. Because his commentary on Aristophanes' Clouds (1968) was the first to go into detail about the physiology and psychology of the play's sexual jokes, it was greeted frostily in many quarters, as if it demonstrated Dover were some kind of pervert.

That is quite interesting; makes me want to re-read the work, to see if I can discern what he meant.

He realised the sensitivities of his subject and carefully prefaced his epoch-making Greek Homosexuality (1978), the first and best scholarly study of the subject, with the words: "No argument which purports to show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural, healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with God's will or contrary to it, tells me whether any particular homosexual act is morally right or morally wrong. No act is sanctified, and none is debased, simply by having a genital dimension."

Interesting way of puting it. Certainly homosexuality is in Aristophanes's work, though, as I recall, he made fun of it.

It made no difference. Some parts of the gay community immediately assumed that, because he showed the Greeks were hostile to sex between bearded males, Dover was somehow attacking contemporary homosexual practice. A Californian gay magazine, meanwhile, began its review of the book with the words "The well-known British homosexual Sir Kenneth Dover … " Dover considered suing, but was advised against.

Kenneth James Dover was born on March 11 1920. His father had a safe job in the lower echelons of the Civil Service, from which he was invalided out in 1946; his mother, a teacher's daughter,  Dover despised his father, but his mother's reason and honesty was to have a profound influence on him.

submitted with rational good humour to her husband's uncertain temper.. What US obituarist can turn that kind of phrase?

The infant Kenneth was precocious and could read at three; his first passion was for insects. At St Paul's he became competent in Latin and fell in love with Greek. He also consciously cultivated, as he explained, a stoicism impermeable to his own and other people's emotions, a project in which he regretfully admitted to being "a little too successful". Dover's cold rationalism could certainly make him seem a forbidding figure and occasionally a risible one. He went up to Balliol in 1938 where he took a first in Mods and won the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse in his first year. Soon after starting Greats he was commissioned and in March 1941 joined the Eighth Army in the desert war. After landing at Salerno in September 1943, Dover remained in Italy for the rest of the war, taking part in the final battle at Cassino. Though mentioned in despatches, he never rose above the rank of lieutenant.

Back in Oxford, Dover took a First, won a Harmsworth Senior Fellowship at Merton and in 1948 was elected to a Balliol fellowship and lectureship at Wadham. This was the start of a career that was to take him to the chair of Greek at St Andrews (1955-76), the Presidency of Corpus Christi, Oxford (1976-86), and would light up the classical world. For Dover, problems about the Greek world could be solved only by being a perfectionist in matters of language and willing to make use of the experiences of other cultures. It was the application of these principles to a vast range of scholarly problems under the guidance of his diamond-hard intellect that made him unmatched in the world of Greek scholarship.

Prose and poetry, history and literature, detailed textual commentaries and wide-ranging social analyses were all part and parcel of an intellectual existence that he found constantly gripping and which he was only too willing to share with others – scholars, sixth-formers and beginners at Greek summer schools alike (Dover wrote a beginners' Greek course for use at St Andrews). He once admitted that he had never been bored for more than five seconds in the whole of his life.

How lucky.

Of the eight Greek literary genres, Dover produced definitive work in articles and books on seven (only missing out the epic). He wrote commentaries on the historian Thucydides (from 1965-81), the comic poet Aristophanes (Clouds, 1968, Frogs, 1993, and Aristophanic Comedy in 1972), the pastoral poet Theocritus (1971) and the philosopher Plato (Symposium, 1980). This last was not well received, since Dover regarded arguments about metaphysics as a waste of precious time. Greek Word Order was published in 1960, followed by his Sather lectures on the rhetorician Lysias in 1968. There were general books on The Greeks, arising from a television series; Ancient Greek Literature (with others) in 1980; and The Evolution of Greek Prose Style in 1997.

The book that pleased Dover most was his Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (1974), a brilliant analysis of what the Greek man on the Sunium omnibus thought about, inter alia, human nature, the environment (a topic close to Dover's heart), heredity, age, sex, status, moral responsibility, death, money, the gods, inequality, the state, and so on, full of characteristically sharp Doverian asides on the modern world's response to the same issues. His collected papers – Greek and the Greeks and The Greeks and Their Legacy – appeared in 1987-88.


In 1976 Dover was lured back to Oxford as President of Corpus Christi. Never one to duck administrative responsibilities, he had already been President of the Hellenic Society (1971-4) and of the Classical Association (1975) and chairman and co-editor of various classical journals and their boards. In 1983 he chaired the committee on undergraduate admissions at Oxford.


Dover had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966 and was President (1978-81) when Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a traitor and the question arose as to whether he should be expelled. Dover tried with only partial success to hold the ring between competing factions within the Academy but the problem solved itself when Blunt resigned. For Dover, who privately thought expulsion could be justified on the grounds that Blunt had transferred his allegiance to a government hostile to the pursuit of scholarship, the whole affair was "absorbingly interesting and therefore intensely enjoyable".


In 1981, while still President of Corpus, Dover was appointed to the ceremonial position of Chancellor of St Andrews, where he returned to the family home after retiring from Corpus in 1986. Always an eager academic traveller, Dover was welcomed all over the scholarly world. During a sabbatical in 1982 he lectured in Princeton, Toronto, Melbourne, Tokyo and Beijing, and later held posts as "Professor at Large" at Cornell (1984-9) and Professor of Classics (Winter Quarter) at Stanford (1988-92). He was much impressed by the intelligence and liveliness of American classical postgraduates.


Kenneth Dover was knighted in 1977. He married, in 1947, Audrey Latimer; they had a son and a daughter.

Raphael Samuel

 

Discussed in The Dead Beat, page 178: by Martin Anderson, obit pages, London Independent:  "Samuel had been a Marxist social historian at Oxford. In the mid-sixties he advanced the revolutionary idea that history didn't happen only to armies and kings, it also happened to ordinary people. His workshops on women's history, the history of childhood, and the culture of the immigrant had, as Samuel's obituarist in the Independent put it, "led people on journeys of self-discovery by blowing away the walls which separated working people from literary culture."

Math giant

Israel M. Gelfand as a professor of mathematics at Rutgers.

October 8, 2009
Israel Gelfand, Math Giant, Dies at 96
By KENNETH CHANG

Israel M. Gelfand, one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics, whose work cleared paths for other thinkers in fields as diverse as physics and medical imaging, died on Monday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 96.

The death, at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Tatiana.

Dr. Gelfand did not achieve fame from attacking and solving famous, intractable problems. Instead, he was a pioneer in untrodden mathematical fields, laying the foundation and creating tools for others to use.

“People always compare him with great mathematicians like Euler or Hilbert or Poincaré,” said Vladimir Retakh, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers, where Dr. Gelfand spent most of his time as a visiting professor after leaving the Soviet Union in 1989.

Dr. Retakh said Vladimir Arnold, a prominent Russian mathematician, had contrasted the approaches of the Soviet Union’s two most famous mathematicians — Dr. Gelfand and Andrei Kolmogorov, who was Dr. Gelfand’s thesis adviser — with a travel analogy.

“Suppose they both arrived in a country with a lot of mountains,” Dr. Retakh said of Dr. Arnold’s comparison. “Kolmogorov would immediately try to climb the highest mountain. Gelfand would immediately start to build roads.”

Dr. Gelfand’s pioneering work in a highly abstract field known as representation theory has proven crucial for physicists working with quantum mechanics. “It’s kind of the main language people use there,” said Andrei Zelevinsky, a professor of mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston.

Later work in another field, integral geometry, seemingly just as abstract and obscure, is now used to turn the raw data of M.R.I.’s and CAT scans into three-dimensional images. “This turned out to be a mathematical apparatus crucial for tomography,” Dr. Zelevinsky said. “You need rather deep mathematics to do that.”

Dr. Retakh said, “He was probably the last of the greatest who worked in almost every area of mathematics.”

Dr. Gelfand also recruited talented mathematicians as students and collaborators, many of whom also achieved prominence. At Moscow State University, where he taught for decades, he held a legendary weekly series of math seminars that, instead of typical invited prepared talks, sometimes unfolded more like math improv.

“He’s probably the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” said Alexander B. Goncharov, a professor of mathematics at Brown University and one of Dr. Gelfand’s students. “Unpredictable and very wise.”

Dr. Retakh said that what a typical day’s seminar would cover would not be known until it started, often with conversations before the seminar leading to Dr. Gelfand’s choosing an impromptu speaker and an impromptu topic. “The joke was: ‘We cannot tell what will be at the seminar. We can tell what it will not be. What it will not be is the talk that was announced,’ ” Dr. Retakh said.

For the speaker, it could be a difficult challenge, stretching for several hours, with Dr. Gelfand interrupting with questions, observations and sometimes cutting remarks. “He was not the most delicate, polite person in the world,” Dr. Zelevinsky said.

But for the speaker and the attendees, the sessions also provided valuable insight into Dr. Gelfand’s thinking.

He started a second seminar series, on biology, after leukemia struck one of his sons, Aleksandr. “The best Moscow biologists were happy to come and attend this seminar and give talks and hear very unusual opinion,” said Simon Gindikin, a colleague at Rutgers.

Aleksandr succumbed to leukemia, but Dr. Gelfand continued work in biology, Dr. Retakh said.

Born in Ukraine near Odessa, Israel Moiseevich Gelfand never finished high school. He never attended college as an undergraduate. Dr. Gelfand went to Moscow when he was 16 or 17, working at odd jobs. Already interested in mathematics, he attended seminars, and at the age of 19, he was admitted directly into graduate school at Moscow State University, studying under Kolmogorov.

Dr. Gelfand completed his ordinary doctorate in 1935 and then a higher doctor of mathematics degree in 1940.

As a Jew, Dr. Gelfand was pushed out of a position at the prestigious Steklov Institute and then out of a full-time professorship at Moscow University. He then ended up at the Institute of Applied Mathematics. He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1953, but only as a second-tier corresponding member, and did not receive full membership in the academy until 1984.

In 1989, Dr. Gelfand left the Soviet Union for the United States. He spent a year at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until obtaining a position at Rutgers, where he resumed his seminar series on a smaller scale for several years.

Dr. Gelfand’s awards include membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in Britain, and a MacArthur grant in 1994.

An earlier marriage, to Zorya Shapiro, ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife, Tatiana, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Sergei, of Providence, R.I., and Vladimir, of Chicago; a daughter, Tatiana, of Jersey City; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Gelfand, who often said, “You have to be fast only to catch fleas,” sought to teach not only the rules of math, but also the beauty and exactness of the field.

“Mathematics is a way of thinking in everyday life,” Dr. Gelfand said in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. “It is important not to separate mathematics from life. You can explain fractions even to heavy drinkers. If you ask them, ‘Which is larger, 2/3 or 3/5?’ it is likely they will not know. But if you ask, ‘Which is better, two bottles of vodka for three people, or three bottles of vodka for five people?’ they will answer you immediately. They will say two for three, of course.”

Intellectual historian

John P. Diggins, an intellectual historian who brought a provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right, and to figures as varied as Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of colon cancer, said his companion, Elizabeth Harlan.

Mr. Diggins, who taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, roamed widely as he traced the intellectual contours of American political thought from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day. His interest in the twists and turns of ideology, and the evolution of ideas, led him to explore pivotal thinkers all along the political spectrum whose preoccupations and struggles led him to the deeper questions of American identity and self-definition.

John P. Diggins in 1992.

He was fascinated, for example, by a fault line in American thought: the great divide that he perceived between the Declaration of Independence, whose language of self-fulfillment presupposed the golden rule of civic virtue, and the Constitution, whose careful attention to property rights and the pursuit of gain reflected the harsher American value of “power, struggle and self-assertion,” as he put it in his book on Lincoln, “On Hallowed Ground” (2000).

It was Lincoln’s mission, he wrote, and a continuing challenge for Americans today, to revalidate the language of the declaration.

“He was the most philosophical-minded of the American historians,” said the political historian Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University. “He was always trying to get at the big questions, about heroism, virtue and the conflict between utopian aspirations and the disappointments of life. His work was a kind of ongoing meditation.”

John Patrick Diggins was born in San Francisco, where his father, an Irish immigrant, was a gardener for the city. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957, he earned a master’s degree at San Francisco State College (now University) and a doctorate at the University of Southern California in 1964.

He taught intellectual history at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Irvine, before accepting a post at the Graduate Center in 1990.

After writing “Mussolini and Fascism” (1972), a study of that leader’s surprising popularity in the United States before World War II, Mr. Diggins established his reputation as a historian of ideas with “The American Left in the Twentieth Century” (1973) and “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American History” (1975).

In his study of the left Mr. Diggins proposed a taxonomy of lefts — the Lyrical Left of the 1920s and early ’60s, the Old Left of the Depression, the New Left of the late ’60s and the post-’60s Academic Left — and identified some characteristics linking these distinctive movements.

They drew philosophical sustenance from purely American roots, for one thing, and exhibited a peculiarly American blend of “radical innocence” and “wounded idealism,” he wrote. Revised and updated, the book was republished in 1992 with the title “The Rise and Fall of the American Left.”

“Up From Communism,” by contrast, described the intellectual journey of four doctrinaire leftists — Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg and James Burnham — who shook off their original faith and embraced conservatism. Mr. Diggins, resisting the facile explanations often assigned to these figures by both left- and right-wing writers, restored complexity and nuance to their stories.

The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like “The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism” (1984), “The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority” (1994) and “Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy” (2007).

A practiced contrarian, he outdid himself in “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History” (2007). After poring over Reagan’s writings, he discovered, in a figure he had treated dismissively, a Reagan pulsating with virtues that could only be called liberal. He was, in this version, an Emersonian at heart.

Mr. Diggins’s three marriages ended in divorce. Besides his companion, his survivors include a son, Sean, of San Francisco; a daughter, Nicole Diggins Locher of Lexington, Mass.; his sisters, Rose Parodi of Orinda, Calif., and Anne Keenan of Potomac, Md.; and two grandchildren.

At his death he had nearly completed a book on the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Politically elusive, Mr. Diggins described his own position as lying “to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right.” He nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be “one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.”

“His great virtue was not to occupy a place on the political spectrum,” Mr. Berman said. “He occupied a different kind of space. Readers sometimes found this perplexing, but after a deeper reading it became clear that this was what gave him his unique value.”

January 30, 2009
John P. Diggins, 73, Historian, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES