Obituary of Theodore Kalogeropoulos (1931-2012)

When Theodore (Ted) Kalogeropoulos retired from Syracuse University in 1998 as Emeritus Professor of Physics, he was greatly missed by his colleagues for his unflagging cheer and enthusiasm. He was a good friend to us all. Upon retirement, he moved to his beloved homeland, Greece, where he had built his dream house by the sea. In an e-mail, dated October 1999, Ted wrote that if an index for climate were added to average income, Greece would be the richest country in Europe, and “I, with an American retirement income and Greek ‘weather income‘, would belong to the club of the very rich.” At that time Ted was already battling lymphoma but still considered himself “very lucky”. He died of cancer in Athens on September 7, 2012. Ted was born January 20, 1931 in the small village of Mallota (fewer than 100 inhabitants) in the prefecture of Arcadia, Greece, where his father was the village priest. His primary education began in Mallota and continued with high school in Athens. He then entered the University of Athens and received his diploma in physics with high honors in 1954. He began graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1959 with a dissertation under Professor Gerson Goldhaber. The antiproton had just recently (1955) been discovered at the Bevatron accelerator of the Laurence Radiation Laboratory (LRL) at Berkeley. Ted’s dissertation was titled A Study of the Antiproton Annihilation Process in Complex Nuclei. The subject of antiprotons became a lifelong fascination with Ted. He also participated in a bubble chamber experiment at LRL, published under the title “Pion-pion correlations in antiproton annihilation events”. After receiving his PhD, Ted worked for a short time as a post-doc at Columbia University. He and his wife Nafsika had one adopted daughter, Yulie, who lives in Florida. Nafsika became an artist and some of her paintings still grace the office of the Physics Department at Syracuse University. She died in Greece in 2009. Ted joined the physics faculty at SU in 1962 (CHECK!). There he continued his studies of antiproton interactions with protons and neutrons at rest, using bubble chambers, spark chambers, wire chambers, NaI crystals, and novel time-of-flight techniques. He was leading an experimental group at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 1963 and 1984 in work sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Later, he became interested in medical applications of antiprotons in diagnostic imaging and therapeutic applications. He also participated in a study in which optimization algorithms were to be used in correcting images taken by ground-based astronomical telescopes for atmospheric distortions. Ted was popular among his colleagues and students, both graduate and undergraduate. He was the sponsor of 20 doctoral dissertaitons. After retirement from Syracuse University, Ted became active with the high energy group at the University of Athens. There he supervised several more dissertations in physics. Following the news of Ted’s death, Peter Saulson, Martin A. Pomeantz ‘37, Professor of Physics and Department Chair at SU, read the following to an assembly of faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences: "…Ted taught courses across our undergraduate curriculum, but was especially known for his course on modern physics. His teaching style was strikingly interactive in an era when many of his colleagues delivered rather formal lectures.” In the Chair’s nomination of Ted for emeritus status, he was described as “inimitable”. Ted was surely that, a colorful character who experienced every aspect of life tto the fullest, whether it was doing physics or barbecuing a lamb for Easter. He remains an inspiration to all who knew him.”