|
OBITUARY
Paul Gordon,
BS 1939, MS and PhD 1949, acclaimed scientist, engineer, and educator,
died on June 7, 2001 of an aortic aneuryism. A memorial service
was held at the Illinois Institute of Technology on November 2.
Dr. Gordon had an impact on scientific community and on U.S. national
defense. He had an impact on the Chicago area through the building
up of the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was a professor
from 1949 to 1951 and from 1954 until the time of his death. From
1966 to 1976 he was chairman of the department. Prior this long
stint at I.I.T., he was a professor at the Fermi Institute at
the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1954.
Dr. Gordon
was born in Hartford, Connecticut on January 1, 1918, the middle
of three children of Charles and Anna Goldstein. He worked his
way through college with many simultaneous jobs (such as doing
the laundry of others in the dorms at MIT), attending Wesleyan
University for two years and then MIT, receiving his BSc. degree
in 1939 and his masters and doctorate in metallurgy in 1949, all
from MIT. He married Evelyn Rubin, of Boston, in 1941 and they
had two children.
At the beginning
of World War II, Paul Gordon volunteered for the Navy, but was
rejected, being told that the Navy had no need for metallurgists.
It was around this time that he changed his last name from Goldstein
to Gordon. Dr. Gordon subsequently taught at M.I.T. and worked
as a group leader on the Manhattan Project during the war and
was in charge of physical metallurgy for the Atomic Energy Commission
at MIT after the war. Over the next decade or so he continued
to do research for the Atomic Energy Commission. Raised amid communities
of left-wing Jewish intellectuals, both of the Gordons sympathized
with progressive political and social causes, actively supporting
Henry Wallace for President in 1948. However, there were real
dangers during the "McCarthy period," especially for Jewish scientists
involved in nuclear research efforts who also had progressive
political sympathies—signing petitions supporting Wallace
was enough to cast one under suspicion.
Dr. Gordon's
career in Chicago comprised dedicated, effective, and acclaimed
teaching, extensive service to his department at IIT, research
and publishing, and consulting to industry as an engineer and
to the courts as an expert witness. His scientific specialties
were the deformation and failure of metals as in metal machines,
devices, and structures; sub-microscopic phase transformations
and property-structure relationships in metals; and , generally,
the power, mystery, and effects of the theories of thermodynamics.
He published many articles and seminar papers, conrtibuted to
numerous books, produced many proprietary scientific reports and
results of investigations-well over one hundred total publications.
In 1963 his book, Principles of Phase Diagrams in Materials
Systems, was published. A Japanese-language edition was published
in 1971. He worked in close, productive relationships with many
colleagues and students. He conducted some 900 investigations
of metals failures—including the devastating collapse of
a CTA "L" track support in 1978—from prosthetic implants
and devices, to tools, hooks, fasteners, automotive parts, appliances,
jacks, ladders, presses, pressure vessels, and welded parts, to
cranes, airplanes, railroads, bridges, buildings, and other structures.
He provided expert court testimony in some 40 cases. He was a
scientific consultant to the Ryerson steel company for several
decades. Some of his investigations were in the normal, everyday,
macrocosmic world of accidents. For example, he investigated the
crash of two Sikorsky helicopters, the collapse of a Kmart roof,
the crash of a Forest Service DC-3, a failed surgical implant,
a failed scaffold, and an exploded transmission in a dragster.
On the other hand, the molecular and the subatomic comprised the
world where he carried out his research, such as, in 1945, "The
Transformation of Retained Austenite in High Speed Steel at Sub-Atmospheric
Temperatures," "Edge-Nucleated, Growth-Controlled Recrystallization
of Copper" (1955), and "The Mechanisms of Crack Nucleation and
Propagation in Metal-Induced Embrittlement of Metals" (1982).
Other unpublished, commissioned reports cover a wide range, from
the magnetic susceptibility of uranium alloys to the cracking
of stainless steel mutators in ice cream machines.
Among his
many academic and scientific honors, there were two he was most
proud of. In 1957 he received the Mathewson Gold Medal, awarded
by the AIME (American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum
Engineers) for the best scientific paper of the previous three
years. In 1993 he received the Albert Easton White Distinguished
Teacher Award of the American Society of Metals International.
In addition, he was exceptionally dedicated to establishing and
maintaining the world-renowned quality of the Department of Metallurgical
Engineering at IIT for five decades. Dr. Gordon's colleagues and
students considered him to have an unusually brilliant and incisive
scientific mind. His journey, from an unprivileged but happy childhood
in a family with no money but three lively brainy children, to
become a patriarch of a major scientific community in academia,
is inspiring.
Paul Gordon
is survived by his son, Dana Gordon, of New York City, and his
daughter, Janelle Higgins, of Fairfax, California, and by three
grandchildren.
|
