Physics Today David John TrittonHarry L. Swinney and Peter A. Davies Citation: Physics Today 52(4), 82 (1999); doi: 10.1063/1.882637 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.882637 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/52/4?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing

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and his forecasts, both in science andin life, were unusually accurate.

In the 1970s, Alyosha felt that hiswork on Regge poles and Regge cutswas more or less complete. It had beenvery fruitful, with many experimentalchecks and predictions, and could havecontinued for a long time, but his innervoice told him to switch fields. Thusprompted, he began exploring theHiggs sector in gauge theories. Heproposed many elegant schemes andpredicted the existence of light parti-cles resulting from broken symmetries,which I think are very likely to bediscovered in the future, since theirreason for existence is very generic.

Later, in the 1980s and 1990s,Alyosha had the brilliant and originalidea to consider the coherent pion fieldproduced at high energy and to exploreits experimental implications. Still inactive development, the subject is nowbeing worked on by many people.

Alyosha was extraordinarily tal-ented. His was not so much a technicaltalent, but some intrinsic feeling ofright and wrong, plus the ability toexpress this feeling with elegance andclarity. He was one of the most engag-ing people I have ever known, and wasoften surrounded by the scientists, art-ists and poets who were his friends.He was a wonderful teacher—alwayshelping and never interfering—andguided many very successful students.In the difficult times of the Soviet era,he was one of the very few who neverlost face or dignity. I miss him deeply.

ALEXANDER POLYAKOVPrinceton University

Princeton, New Jersey

David John TrittonThe eminent fluid dynamicist David

John Tritton died of coronary ar-tery disease on 24 April 1998 in Austin,Texas. David is best known for hislucid, widely acclaimed textbook,Physical Fluid Dynamics (Oxford Uni-versity Press), which was first publish-ed by van Nostrand in 1977 and is stillin print in its second edition.

Born on 26 July 1935 in Slough,England, David earned a BAin naturalsciences from the University of Cam-bridge in 1956. He stayed at Cam-bridge to do a PhD at the Cavendishlab under the supervision of the re-nowned fluid dynamicist Alan Town-send. For his thesis work, he experi-mented on flow past cylinders and freeconvection. After earning his doctoratein 1960, David carried out postdoctoralresearch in the department of aeronau-tical engineering at the Indian Instituteof Science in Bangalore.

In 1963, Keith Runcorn recruited

DAVID JOHN TRITTON

David to a lectureship in the physicsdepartment of the University of New-castle upon Tyne. Runcorn, who wasbuilding up a strong and distinctiveresearch school in geophysics andplanetary physics, recognized the cru-cial role of fluid dynamics in the de-velopment of planetary geodesy andgeomagnetism there.

Runcorn's judgment was provedright. David strengthened the role offluid dynamics in the department's geo-physical research, and he built a pro-ductive group that conducted labora-tory experiments on a wide variety ofrelated problems, including convection,rotating flows, stratified flows and tur-bulence. David also broadened the de-partment's interests to include atmos-pheric and oceanic problems, and heestablished fluid dynamics as a keycomponent of the undergraduate phys-ics curriculum—a characteristic sharedby few other British universities.

David based his internationally fa-mous Physical Fluid Dynamics on thedistinctive undergraduate course hedeveloped at Newcastle. The book re-mains unsurpassed in its presentationof the subject from a physicist's pointof view. With its many illustrativeexamples from laboratory experiments,simple, clear arguments and a bareminimum of carefully chosen mathe-matical analyses, the book is not onlyunique, but also a favorite of the manystudents and researchers who havebought or borrowed it.

Following Runcorn's retirement,geophysics research at Newcastle be-gan to decline in the mid-1980s, andDavid opted to take early retirementand looked abroad for opportunities toconcentrate on research again. In1991-93, he worked at L'Institut deMecanique de Grenoble (IMG), primar-ily with Gabriel Chabert d'Hieres andDominique Renouard's group on rotat-

ing boundary currents.In 1993, when his wife Sheila be-

came ill with cancer, David largelywithdrew from professional activitiesto care for her in Newcastle. However,he stayed in contact with research, usinghis old department as his base. Non-linear characteristics of compound pen-dula formed the focus of his research.

After Sheila died in 1996, Davidbegan to travel to scientific meetingsagain and to strengthen his existingconnections with other researchgroups. In early 1998, he moved to theUniversity of Texas at Austin, to workwith Harry Swinney on aspects of Cou-ette flow.

During his too-short stay in Austin,David interacted with colleagues fromseveral departments, as well as inSwinney's Center for Nonlinear Dy-namics. He enjoyed his new lease onlife, and presented a short course inthe physics department on turbulence.

David was genuinely interested inall branches of fluid dynamics and,because of his exceptional physical in-sight, could shed light on fluid dynami-cal problems that were wholly new tohim. Whether he was engaged in in-formal discussions, reviewing papersor examining PhD students, his ap-proach was always underpinned by in-tellectual rigor.

David's many friends will recall hispuckish humor, his sense of irony andhis ability to detect (and gently deflate)pretentiousness. And his research stu-dents, colleagues and collaborators willattest to his firm principles and to hisgenerosity and kindness. He will begreatly missed.

HARRY L. SWINNEYUniversity of Texas at Austin

PETER A, DAVIESUniversity of Dundee

Dundee, Scotland

Mark Joseph Cornelia

Mark Joseph Cornelia, whose out-standing teaching at the Univer-

sity of Pittsburgh and Duquesne Uni-versity had a lasting impact on hisstudents, died in Latrobe, Pennsylva-nia, on 31 December 1998 after a longillness.

Born in Latrobe on 31 March 1958,Mark earned a BS in physics fromSaint Vincent College in 1980 and aPhD in physics from the University ofPittsburgh in 1990. His thesis, whichhe wrote under the supervision of J.N. Bardsley, was entitled "NumericalStudies of Electrons in Time Depend-ent Electric Fields."

It was said that Mark was in norush to finish his thesis work because

82 APRIL 1999 PHYSICS TODAY

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