Obituary of Richard Watson (1931-2010)

Richard E. Watson of Brookhaven, New York, died September 13, 2010, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and post-polio syndrome. Born on September 30, 1931 in New York City, he was an insightful and talented physicist and an inspiration to those of us who knew him. Dick grew up in New York City and Wallingford, Connecticut and attended high school in Vermont. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1953. While doing a summer internship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he contracted polio, just a few years before the polio vaccine became available. Never one to let polio define him, he went on to receive his Ph.D. in 1958 from MIT under the direction of John Slater. His thesis work produced the first comprehensive set of atomic Hartree-Fock calculations for the 3d series. These widely cited calculations were performed on the Whirlwind computer at MIT and he continued to make use of new computational facilities throughout his career. Following post-doctoral work at Harwell, England and Uppsala University in Sweden, he spent several years at Bell Laboratories. In 1965, he joined the Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory where he remained until he retired as a senior physicist in 2002. In the early years of his professional career, in addition to atomic Hartree-Fock calculations, Dick and his colleagues studied magnetic hyperfine effects, deciphering spin-orbit terms and form factors. These pioneering, and at the time non-trivial, calculations allowed detailed comparisons between theory and experiment, and greatly advanced the quantum mechanical understanding of the electronic structure of condensed matter systems. Dick had an enduring interest in metallic alloys and their phase diagrams, a body of work for which he was awarded the prestigious Hume-Rothery award of the Metallurgical Society. He was equally adept at developing simple model and structural maps, as he was with the use of first-principles calculations. He was a leading voice for the development and use of band theoretical approaches to understand structural and magnetic phases of transition-metals, rare-earth, actinide, and metalloid systems, emphasizing how the results could be related to physical concepts such as atomic size or electronegativity. Dick was a guiding force in the development of LASTO, the Linear Augmented Slater Type Orbital method which was used at Brookhaven for more than two decades to study alloy electronic structure. He had an uncanny ability to see patterns in both calculated and experimental data, and then to translate his insights into a deeper understanding of the underlying physics. Although a theorist by training, Dick had an in-depth knowledge of experiment that led to collaborations with a number of experimentalists over the years. As an outgrowth of these interactions, he was an early advocate of the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven and played a major role in its design. Both within the Physics Department and the Condensed Matter Theory Group, was a valuable resource for his encyclopedic knowledge. Moreover, Dick was a kind and thoughtful mentor to a long line of post-docs and junior staff. Dick’s contributions extend beyond physics. He was active in the community, including being a scout master for many years and serving on local government committees dealing with environmental issues. Despite needing crutches, he was an avid sailor and gardener. Dick was straightforward, open, and modest. He could talk at length and knowledgeably on almost any topic, from classical music to history to the intricacies of spin-orbit effects on bonding; he was entertaining as well as thought-provoking. He will be sorely missed.