IN MEMORIAM

Byron Wright

Professor of Physics

UC Los Angeles

1917 - 2015

Longtime UCLA Physics Professor Byron Terry Wright died peacefully, surrounded by family, at the home of his daughter in Los Angeles on the evening of April 9th, 2015 at the age of 97. He was born to Wilbur and Dora Thompson Wright on October 19, 1917 in Waco Texas and attended Rice University where as a physics undergraduate, the results of his experiment were published as a Letter to the Editor in the Physical Review.

 

From 1938 to 1941 he worked at the Radiation Laboratory under Earnest Lawrence while he obtained his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1941 he was part of a group involved in antisubmarine research at the naval facility in Point Loma, California and his work on an underwater camera led to an unexpected visit to Pearl Harbor on December 24-25th in an unsuccessful attempt to survey the harbor entrance sea floor. In 1942 he was one of many physicists invited to Berkeley to work on a project to determine the feasibility of using a mass spectrometer to produce enriched uranium for an atomic bomb. During the next three years he traveled between Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos working on various aspects of what became known as the Manhattan Project. During this period he met and married the love of his life, Lorna Doone Bloemers on October 21, 1944.

 

In 1946, the family, which now included his first daughter Carol, moved from Berkeley along with the Berkeley cyclotron to UCLA where he began his long career as a Physics professor. During the following years, two more daughters, Susan and Gail, joined the family as he rose to the position of full professor by 1956. During his career he was a Fulbright resident scholar (56-57), a Guggenheim Fellow (63-64), and a Ford Foundation Fellow at CERN (63-64). One of his achievements was to initiate construction of equipment in 1949 for a new upper division modern physics lab which is still in use today.

 

His beloved wife of 20 years, Lorna, died on October 21, 1964. After 1972 he became an Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at UCLA where he remained until retiring. Family, travel, and outdoor pursuits (and frequently altogether) filled a big part of his life thereafter. He was a rare person who could simultaneously command true respect and true affection. In addition to his daughters and their husbands, Carol and Harry Schrauth, Susan and Donald Garrard and Gail and Joel Rosenblum he is survived by his grandchildren David, Brent, Cynthia, Tyler, Morgan, Corey, Aaron, Lorna, Stephanie and Maegan. Additionally, he has seven great-grandchildren: Tasmine, Akayla, Emily, Michael, Cameron, Lucas and Elliot.