Carl T. Tomizuka
After an extraordinary career spanning 60 years in physics in his native Japan and the universities of Illinois, Chicago and Arizona, Carl Tatsuo Tomizuka succumbed to the complications of a fall on 9 August 2017 and parted this life. A graduate of Tokyo University, he was privileged to be selected for an American Fulbright Award for study in the US only five years after the conclusion of World War II. In 1960, after achieving the PhD in condensed matter physics, he was recruited from the University of Chicago to the University of Arizona to become the first of a set of nationally acknowledged research physicists in the department of physics, where he became chair and contributed in significant ways to its national reputation. His specialty was the physics of solids at high pressure, about which he convened an international conference at Arizona in 1962 and edited a book with his colleague Roy Emrick.
Tomizuka won numerous awards for teaching and in time became associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. As a teacher–scholar, he pioneered the then-nascent field of computer-assisted instruction, making it possible by means of long-distance telephone lines for middle school students in Window Rock, Arizona to download portions of their lessons from a building-size computer at the University of Illinois. Their local teachers found that when pupils were not having to compete with one another, but could study and be tested in the privacy of their desks, they did better. The subject was middle school mathematics.
Later, assisted by longtime colleagues Jonathan Kent (physics) and Richard Demers (linguistics), Tomizuka pioneered the teaching of introductory physics and “exotic” foreign languages employing language-independent software for desktop computers. The language software that the team developed is still in use across the nation. His interest in math and science learning and teaching led him to a 30-year collaboration with his second wife, Sheila Tobias. Together they came up with the idea of engaging graduate students in fields other than science to act as “surrogate learners” in introductory physics and chemistry. They kept running records of what they observed about the “classroom culture” for beginning students and how they would improve it. That study, published as They’re not dumb, they’re different, was enabled by Research Corporation for Science Advancement in Tucson and was widely credited with focusing STEM reform on the first-year college course. Later, the couple collaborated on the book Breaking the Science Barrier: How to Explore and Understand the Sciences, published by the College Board.
