He was co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Harvard Center for UltraCold Atoms; his work paved the way for making the first Bose-Einstein Condensate, and he won numerous awards.
He was also co-author (with Robert Kolenkow of An Introduction to Mechanics, a book with a strict calculus-based approach to the topic and fiendishly difficult problems in it. It was the text for my first college class in physics and it made me realize how dumb I was. A couple of years later Kleppner himself was my professor for Advanced Mechanics, where I learned about Hamiltonians and Lagragians and other nonobvious mathematical methods. He also talked at length about the physics of meteorology, one of his pet interests at the time (although it’s not mentioned in his obituaries). Later still I was a Visiting Scientist at MIT. Although he had retired in 2003, he showed up at the group meetings.
I was very sad to hear this. I never had him as a teacher, nor read any of his papers, but I knew him through committees we both served on. He was a wonderful man.
I don’t know the guy, but I did have a genius mechanics professor who insisted every fiendishly difficult problem be solved from first principles (which much improves analytical skills). His first year university engineering course, which a third of the class failed, did include Hamiltonians (a lot) and Lagrange (a little). Looking back, he touched on most of the engineering we learned over the next four years.
I remember going to check my mark. I did well. He had a”sample copy” of the three exam questions posted on the wall, and it was ninety-two densely written pages. (You got full marks for reducing the answer to seven equations with seven unknowns).
Sounds like quite a guy. I’ll have to check out his textbook.
I’ve yet to meet any physicist who stopped working for a reason as silly as just that they’d retired. The year I left grad school, the most prolific member of the department was a professor who had retired over a decade prior.
My head of department retired at age 67 the year I graduated. He remained emeritus professor until his death 25 years later, just after his latest book was published He would attend faculty meetings at least once a week.About the only thing he retired from was teaching.
That mechanics book is on a shelf behind me. I’ll flick through it later in memory of Daniel Kleppner.