David Halliday

David Halliday, coauthor of one of the most widely used elementary physics textbooks, died of cardiac arrest on 2 April 2010 in Maple Falls, Washington.

Halliday was born in Manchester, UK, on 3 March 1916 and grew up in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a steel town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. After graduating from Homestead High School in 1934, he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he received a BS in 1938 and a PhD in 1941, both in physics. His PhD thesis was titled “Some Coincidence Experiments in Nuclear Physics.”

After conferring his PhD, Pitt awarded Halliday a Buhl Foundation fellowship for the 1941–42 academic year, so that he could continue his nuclear physics research. During World War II, however, Halliday worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. In 1945 he returned to Pitt as an assistant professor; he was rapidly promoted to associate professor in 1947 and to full professor in 1950. Shortly after his return, he began a series of groundbreaking experiments, performed with various PhD students he was advising. His most important research accomplishment, the independent codiscovery of electron spin resonance, has led to a major tool in condensed-matter studies.

Halliday’s textbook-writing career actually had begun while he was a graduate student, when physics professor Archie Garfield Worthing gave him the opportunity to be the junior coauthor of a book; Wiley published Heat, by Worthing and Halliday, in 1948. Two years later Wiley published Halliday’s foundational Nuclear Physics textbook; a second edition, published in 1955, was translated into four languages. But Halliday did not begin work on his most famous and enduring textbooks until after he was named department chair in 1950, when he began a collaboration with one of us (Resnick) on Physics for Students of Science and Engineering; the first edition was published by Wiley in 1960. In 1974 Halliday and Resnick followed with a shorter and less advanced version of Physics, titled Fundamentals of Physics, also published by Wiley. Today Physics is in its fifth edition and Fundamentals is in its seventh. The books have been translated into more than 30 languages. The fifth edition of Physics also was coauthored by Ken Krane; Jearl Walker is a coauthor of the seventh edition of Fundamentals. It is estimated that more than 10 million students worldwide have studied from the books.

In 1962 Halliday was again promoted by Pitt, from physics department chair to dean of the division of natural sciences; in 1967 he was named the first dean of Pitt’s newly formed Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He resigned from the deanship in 1969 and returned to the physics department, from which he retired in 1975. Soon after retirement Halliday and his wife, Alice, moved to the Seattle area to be near their only child, David George Halliday. The move also enabled the elder Halliday to indulge his passion for mountain climbing. He took great pleasure in the Seattle area scenery and continued walking therein, though of course no longer climbing, until the day of his death. He and Alice, who passed away in 2006, were devotedly married for 62 years.

Halliday was a great fan of James Joyce; during his years at Pitt he managed to accumulate an impressive collection of Joyce memorabilia, including major original editions of each of Joyce’s works. He was especially fond of Joyce’s Ulysses, and every 16 June—the day in Leopold Bloom’s life that Joyce chronicles—he faithfully celebrated Bloomsday with other fans, often traveling to New York City for that purpose.

Halliday combined a warm personality with a quiet sense of humor, and as department chair he was fair, respectful, and well liked. His remaining former physics department colleagues, including us, will both greatly miss Halliday and remember him fondly.