James Donald Louck
James Donald Louck died on 21 November 2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was born on 13 December 1928 in Morley, Michigan, and grew up on a farm, excelling in science and mathematics and graduating as valedictorian of the 1946 class of the Morley Consolidated School. Jim attended Central Michigan College for two years before joining the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps, which provided the opportunity for him to continue his education at the Auburn Polytechnic Institute (later renamed Auburn University). He graduated with a BS in 1950 and received Auburn’s Comer Medal for Excellence in Natural Science. In 1952 he completed an MS at Ohio State University and was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. After serving aboard the USS Wisconsin from July 1952 to June 1953, he was assigned to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, where he served until September 1955. During this time he took part in the nuclear bomb tests in the Bikini Islands.
Jim returned to Ohio State and in 1958 completed his PhD dissertation on “A new quantum-mechanical treatment of the rotating vibrating tetrahedral XY4 molecule.” He then spent two years as a Staff Member at Los Alamos, where he met Marge, whom he married in 1960 and who, along with their son Tom, survives him. After three years on the faculty at Auburn, Jim went back to Los Alamos, where he was a staff member in the theoretical division and was among the first scientists at Los Alamos to be appointed to the position of Laboratory Fellow (1983). Following his “retirement” in 1991 he became a Laboratory Associate and remained deeply engaged in his research for many years.
Fundamental symmetries and their implications and applications were the major themes of his career. Much of his early work centered on group theory and angular momentum algebra in the theory of vibration-rotation energies of polyatomic molecules; he served for many years on the editorial board of the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy. His encyclopedic knowledge of angular momentum theory, and the rigor and attention to detail with which he approached the subject, are exemplified in his 1981 books with L. C. Biedenharn on Angular Momentum in Quantum Physics and The Racah–Wigner Algebra in Quantum Theory, and in his article on “Angular momentum theory” in the Springer Handbook of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (2006, 2019).
An outgrowth of his work on angular momentum theory was his deep appreciation for combinatorics, which he viewed as a natural setting for symmetry methods in physics. One of his contributions was the introduction of a class of polynomials that generalize unitary group analogs of spherical harmonics. Their significance was recognized in particular by the renowned mathematicians I. M. Gel’fand and M. I. Graev, who in their work related these “Louck polynomials” to general hypergeometric functions. Another of Jim’s contributions was to show how the MacMahon Master Theorem of combinatorics is important in physics, and to relate it to Schwinger’s generating function approach to the quantum theory of angular momentum. These and many other topics connecting areas of pure mathematics to physics are treated in one of his other books, the magisterial Unitary Symmetry and Combinatorics (2008). In 1998 Nankai University made him honorary director of its Center for Combinatorics. A conference on Combinatorics, Special Functions and Physics, held in his honor at Nankai in 2004, was attended by leading international figures in both physics and mathematics. Gian-Carlo Rota once remarked that Jim was “a gold mine for mathematicians,” but his mathematical knowledge made him likewise a gold mine for physicists.
His efforts and influence were not limited to research. His longtime friend Nick Metropolis, near the end of his life, asked Jim to help to start a scholarship program to promote mathematics and computational science as career choices, especially among younger students. Jim served as president of the Nicholas C. Metropolis Mathematics Foundation from 1996 to 2008 and worked tirelessly to identify and provide financial support for talented students, especially those in the surrounding communities of Los Alamos. Among his many other voluntary activities, he served for 12 years on the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee and was chair of the laboratory’s 50th Anniversary Seminar Series.
While negligent in matters of self-promotion, Jim was fastidious and generous in recognizing the contributions of others. He was an unfailingly supportive and enthusiastic friend and colleague, and will be remembered as a man of uncompromising honesty and integrity.
