Message-ID: <001d01be1d44$d2c28e60$a0b3c183@packard.math.uic.edu> Date: Tue, 1 Dec 1998 10:08:23 -0600 Reply-To: "Neil E. Berger" Sender: Academic Town Hall From: "Neil E. Berger" Subject: Obituary for Victor Twersky Comments: To: academy@uic.edu To: ACADEMY@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Obituary for Victor Twersky Victor Twersky, 75, professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at UIC, died Tuesday, November 17th in Los Altos Hills, California after a long illness. Twersky joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science in 1966 as a full professor and served for many years as Chairman of the Applied Mathematics Program Committee. He retired from UIC in December, 1990 after a long and distinguished career. He is survived by his wife Shirley, son Mark and daughter Nina. He was one of the world's leading authorities on the scattering of radiation of all kinds, from light, radar, and sonar to seismic waves in the Earth. His work is used to analyze the clutter produced by the scattering of radar waves from chaff, to describe the effect of dust on the propagation of light in the atmosphere, to analyze the scattering of light by the red cells in the blood and by biological tissue, etc. He wrote more than 100 articles describing his research, some of them with his students and colleagues. He was frequently invited to describe his work at national and international meetings. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the Acoustical Society of America, and other societies.. He served as the editor of many physics and engineering journals, including the Journal of the Acoustical Society, the Journal of the Optical Society, the I.R.E. Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, the Journal of Mathematical Physics and the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics. Twersky earned a B.S. from City College of New York in 1943, an M.A. from Columbia University in 1948, and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1950, all in physics. From 1950 to 1966, he was an Engineering Specialist and Senior Scientist in the Electronic Defense Laboratories of Sylvania-GTE in Mountain View, California. He was also a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, Stanford University during part of that time. Twersky was twice named a Guggenheim fellow, in 1979-80 to work on "Biophysical Applications of Scattering Theory" and in 1972-73 to study "Scattering Theory and Diagnostic Applications." He was an Associate of the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study in 1969-70 working on "Spatial Correlations for Multiple Scattering in Dense Distributions." The family of Victor Twersky has established a student scholarship in the UIC Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science to honor his memory. Friends, colleagues, and alumni wishing to make contributions to the fund should make checks payable to UIF/Twersky Memorial Fund and send them to UIC LAS External Affairs, M/C 228, 601 S. Morgan St., 408 UH, Chicago, IL 60607-7104. For further information, contact Wally Rozak at 312-413-3468 or via e-mail at wallyr@uic.edu.