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IN MEMORIAM
Frederick Wooten
Professor of Engineering Applied Science, Emeritus
Davis
1928 – 2004
Fred Wooten died on June 15, 2004 after a gallant fight with cancer, bringing to a close the career of one who was a brilliant scholar, a dedicated administrator and above all, a consummate humanitarian.
In examining Fred’s legacy in scholarship, one needs not to go very far from his final area of research. After his retirement in 1996, Fred remained very active and in the highest esteem amongst colleagues in the research area of simulated annealing. The inspiration derived from Fred’s brilliant scholarly achievement is probably most appropriately summarized by a recent colleague, Nicholas Rivier of the Universite Louis Pasteur, Institut de Physique, France. Rivier said, “I regard his demonstration that a network glass (amorphous silicon or vitreous silica) is a foam, a partition of space into disjoint cells bounded by irreducible ‘rings’ (circuits of bonds) as an outstanding achievement. In the way, he has found an operative definition of irreducible rings, a long source of controversy since the early seventies. Now, we can make meaningful ring statistics. This remains to be done (even for very open, crystalline forms of germanium - see Joannopoulos and Cohen, Solid State Physics). The representation of the structure of glass as a R-network, and the combinatorial part of the topological entropy, are also Fred's achievements and Fred's only.” This series of work was published in late 2003, in the Acta Crystallographica A, only a few months prior to his last illness.
Fred’s own inspiration for the afore-mentioned work was derived from the research he carried out with a Department of Applied Science student Kris Winer and a long-time collaborator, Denis Weaire, Fellow of the Royal Society, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. This work represented a contemporaneous discovery of the method of simulated annealing. About Fred, Weaire reminisces, “As computation assumed an ever greater role in physics, he saw the opportunity presented by the Davis-Livermore relationship, and interested himself in simulation. He decided that amorphous solids provided stimulating challenges and made a sabbatical visit to me in Edinburgh in the late 70s to establish a collaboration - we had never met. Out of this came a series of papers, a continuing interaction for me with UC Davis, and a research interest for Fred that he continued up to his death. Our only mistake was to call our eventual structural model for ?-Si the WWW Model (Wooten, Winer, Weaire), which is very confusing today. It continues to be heavily cited, which is not entirely due to that confusion!”
Though one might assume that Fred was always a computational physicist, such was not the case. Fred Wooten was born in Linwood, Pennsylvania on May 16, 1928, to Frederick and Martha Wooten. A descendant of General Daniel Morgan of the American Revolutionary War (on the mother side) as well as the grandson of a coal miner from Wales (on the father side), he became the first from his high school to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a BS degree in physical chemistry in 1950. Upon receiving his PhD from Delaware, he moved west to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, then just LLL) in 1957, where his research activities initially focused on photoelectron spectroscopy. He was instrumental in enticing William Spicer from RCA Laboratories to visit LLL and eventually to Stanford. Fred’s collaboration with Bill Spicer led to the classic work: Mean Free Path of Hot Electrons and Holes in Metals, R. N. Stuart, F. Wooten, and W. E. Spicer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 10, 7-9 (1963).
Throughout his career, Fred Wooten was a genuine scholar and educator. Among his PhD students are Paul Mostellar, (US Army Office of Research), Michael El-Batanouny, Professor of Physics at Boston University, Kris Winer, (LLNL), and Eric Altschuler, MD, Mount Sinai Hospital, NY. The area of research focus evolved with each student, moving from photo-emission spectroscopy (Mostellar), to materials science (El Batanouny), and finally to computational modeling of complex structures (Winer and Altschuler). [Computer Generation of Structural Models of Amorphous Si and Ge, F. Wooten, K. Winer, and D. Weaire, Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 1392-1395 (1985)]
In moving away from the experimental work, Fred Wooten became an intellectual leader in the use of numerical optimization techniques as employed for applied physics problems. He and Eric Altschuler published two definitive papers in Physical Review Letters on a century old problem originally posed by J.J. Thomson: finding the minimum energy configuration of unit charges on the surface of a sphere. [Method of constrained global optimization, E. L. Altschuler, T. J. Williams, E. R. Ratner, F. Dowla, and F. Wooten, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 2671-2674 (1994); Possible Global Minimum Lattice Configurations for Thomson's Problem of Charges on a Sphere, E. L. Altschuler, T. J. Williams, E. R. Ratner, R. Tipton, R. Stong, F. Dowla, and F. Wooten, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 2681-2685 (1997).]
His intellectual contributions also include a time-honored volume entitled, “Optical Properties of Solids”. Fred in his usual, unassuming manner, said, “This is a good way to learn a new subject.” Weaire provided the following comments: “Fred had an unusual versatility. Although originally a nuts-and-bolts experimentalist, he wrote a remarkable textbook of optical properties of solids that has remained popular ever since, and offers a fresh personal insight into the theory.” By the way, faculty in the Department of Applied Science continue to consult the wisdom of this book for didactic teaching in a course thusly named. At the time of his death, He was deeply immersed in the writing of a textbook on group theory with his former student, Michael El-Batanouny.
Fred Wooten joined the Department of Applied Science (DAS) of UC Davis at its LLL site in 1965 as a lecturer. In 1972, he became a Full Professor and assumed the position of Vice Chair of DAS, moving from the Livermore site to the campus of UC Davis. The goal was to develop the then fledging, graduate-student-only department within the College of Engineering into one that would be recognized for its excellence in research and scholarship. He immediately set forth to establish positive relationships with many of the departments in the Colleges of Engineering and Letters and Science.
Fred’s administrative genius came to light after his ascension to the chair’s role of DAS in 1975, a position he held until 1994. When he first ascended to this position, DAS was on a very special (in suspect) status, perceived by the campus community as a rogue department with inclinations toward treading on the sacred creeds of academic freedom and open publication of student-conducted research projects. He was able to convince the campus community, by example, that research led and carried out by DAS students and faculty had indeed every bit of the openness and quality as those from other departments and colleges. During his tenure as the Chair of DAS, the department grew in the number of students and faculty, as well as in reputation. With his foresight, the new faculty members who joined DAS during this era moved from the traditional LLL-focus fields of nuclear fusion, plasma physics and computational physics to one that is much broader: including all of the above as well as laser physics, materials science and biophysics. Fred was a champion of diversity in the workforce. He spearheaded the search and the successful inclusion of the first woman faculty member, Meera Blattner, a computational bioengineer, for DAS in 1980. The current chair, Ann Orel, was also successfully recruited by Fred, both for her intellectual excellence and her administrative savvy.
Fred Wooten was a believer in full campus participation. He partook in many campus committee activities. The most significant one was a major policy-shaping role within the Graduate Council of UC Davis. Overall, Fred’s service to the University was exemplary. His nineteen-year term as department chair was truly exceptional and helped produce his well-deserved reputation as a sage observer of the complex world of academic administration. In the words of his long-time colleague and friend, Denis Weaire, “In his quiet way he had a rich life. …. He was fascinated by the internal machinations of universities, which he observed and recounted with good humor and irony. I should have encouraged him to write a slightly scandalous book about them, but no doubt many will be relieved that he did not...”
To have succeeded in all of this, Fred definitely was a consummate humanitarian. He constantly held true to his principles of righteousness, but he was always deeply concerned for those who are in need and less fortunate. He was a mentor who guided his students like his own children, devoting time and energy for lessons of life as much as professional accomplishments. He always treated his colleagues with the maximum of respect and dignity.
Fred Wooten is survived by his wife, Jane, an attorney (retired), two sons, Donald, an economist, and Barton, an attorney, both of Sacramento, five grandchildren, and two sisters, Jane and Carol.
Ann Orel
Yin Yeh
Dick Christensen