Thomas Erber

Thomas Erber was born in December 1930 in New York City. His parents had emigrated from Austria a few years earlier. He graduated from Peter Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan in 1947. Tom obtained a BS in physics from MIT in 1951 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1957. Tom was a full-time faculty member in the physics department at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago from 1957 to 2008. He obtained a joint appointment as professor of mathematics in 1986, also becoming a distinguished professor at IIT in 1999. Tom was a fellow of the American Physical Society as well as a member of the American Mathematical Society, IEEE, Magnetics Society, Sigma Xi, European Physical Society, Austrian Physical Society, the Institute of Physics (UK), and Victor Franz Hess Gesellschaft. He died in March 2024 in Naples, Florida.

Tom published 100 papers during his lifetime, including one on synchrotron radiation in 2023. Here is a litany of fields that have been significantly influenced by his work:

• Classical electrodynamics (radiation reaction, Cherenkov radiation)
• Quantum electrodynamics (photoelectric effect, Compton scattering synchrotron radiation, vacuum polarization)
• Random processes (randomness in quantum mechanics)
• Cooperative systems (hysteresis, fatigue)
• Magnetism (flux compression, micromagnetics, piezomagnetism)

Students fondly remember Tom’s lectures as being lucid, coherent, and elegant. Tom was also known for his enthusiastic support of young faculty, showing an authentic interest in their field of research and helping them navigate the path to promotion and tenure. He spoke clearly, and he almost never used written notes for reference. Tom took particular delight in pronouncing the names of physicists properly in their native language, and he encouraged students to do the same. His faculty colleagues long admired the chalkboards he left behind after these lectures, with very clear writing and almost “camera ready” copy on the boards. In fact, his lectures were almost theatrical performances. Tom and his late wife Audrey were long-term residents in Oak Park, Illinois, and were active participants in the local community theater. He was also quite involved in amateur ham radio.

As a reflection of the breadth of Tom’s interests in physics, Doing Physics, a Festschrift in honor of his 80th birthday, was published in 2010. It contained articles by former students, colleagues at IIT, collaborators, and friends that dealt with a disparate variety of topics.

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