Leopold Halpern 1925 – 2006
physicist, humanitarian, environmentalist, naturalist, world traveler, friend
- Extended scientific obituary by James Overduin and Hans Plendl,
published on-line at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0608129
and eventually in the
Proceedings of
the Eleventh Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity.
- Newspaper obituary written by friends Katie Kirwin and Gabriele Plendl in
Tallahasee, FL
where Leopold spent his final days with people who truly loved him:
Leopold Halpern 1925-2006 [htm, pdf,
txt].
A poorly formatted version of this appears as an on-line obituary [June 8, 2006]
at
The Tallahassee Democrat
with an on-line "Guest Book" message board available till June 8, 2007.
- A memorial service was held Friday September 1,
2006 at Wakulla Springs
Donations in memory of Leopold may be made (on-line or by mail) to the
Big Bend
Hospice, 1723 Mahan Center Blvd, Tallahassee, FL 32308-5428
academic history
- PhD in Physics in 1952 in Vienna, Austria
- 1952-1953: Fulbright Fellow, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New
York, U.S.A.
- 1953-1956: self-study in Vienna, Austria
- 1956-1959: assistant to Schroedinger in Vienna 1959-1960: CERN, Geneva,
Switzerland
- 1960-1961: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- 1962-1963: Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 1963-1966: University of Stockholm, Sweden
- 1966-1967: Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, France
- 1967-1970: University of Windsor, Canada
- 1970-1973: Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
- 1973-1974: University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 1974-1985: assistant to Dirac, Florida State University, Tallahassee,
Florida, U.S.A.
- 1985-1988: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, U.S.A.
- 1988-2004: Florida State University, Tallahassee
- 2004-2006: Gravity Probe B, Stanford University, California, U.S.A.
Not included in this list are short term visits (of a month or more) at The
Institute of Fundamental Physics, Kyoto, Japan (1970), the International Centre
for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy (1973), the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center in Menlo Park, California (1978), and the Universities of Amsterdam,
Netherlands (1983) and Stockholm, Sweden (1985).
photos
Some photo memories (too few) from bob:
- Remo and Leopold chatting at the PG-B rocket
launch near
Vandenberg Air Force Base and Buelton, CA [Sideways
movie
location] in April, 2004.
- Leopold at GR13 in Cordoba, Argentina
July 1992.
- Leopold in Seoul at the First Italo-Korea Meeting in July 1991 with
Kim and at a
banquet.
- Leopold with Michael Reisenberger
and with Fang Li-Zhi at the Vatican
Observatory
during the First William Fairbank Meeting in September, 1990.
Google Image Search turned up the
Dirac
Symposium December, 2002 Photos:
Florida State University Physics Department Listing
(where Leopold worked for about 20 years)
| Halpern,
Leopold Scientist, Ph.D., University of Vienna,
Austria |
 |
Room: 606 KEN
Phone: 4-5076
E-mail:
halpern at phy
|
Received his Ph.D. from the
University of Vienna, Austria with a thesis on experimental
solid state physics 1952, won a Fulbright grant which he spent
at R.P.I. 1952-1953. Began an advanced study of theoretical
physics after which he became assistant of E. Schroedinger, then
spent years of research at CERN, UNC, Copenhagen, Stockholm,
Paris P.A.M., Dirac at FSU, the spent 1986-1988 at JPL of
Caltech, returning to FSU 1988. His research interests are in
the theory of Gravitation and its relations to quantum and
Elementary Particle Physics. |
|
Ani and I last saw Leopold at the GP-B launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base
(California) in April, 2004 and before that kept
him company while he was eating some corn-on-the-cob late one evening sitting on
a wall on the beach front street in Rio at MG10, July 2003. He will be sorely
missed as the grandfather figure of the University of Rome relativistic
astrophysics group G9 of
Remo Ruffini, who
connected us to him.
-- bob jantzen, villanova university
