One view of the Rudnick‐Putterman UCLA‐acoustics dynasties

During the second half of the 20th Century, the research group headed by Isadore Rudnick augmented then continued to this day by Seth Putterman, brought the formalism and techniques of classical acoustics and phenomenological physics to problems in the quantum mechanics of condensed matter systems. While doing so, Izzy advised 32 Ph.D. students that graduated between 1951 and 1986, half of which went on to academic careers of their own (excluding two of his sons who are also academic scientists), making the UCLA‐acoustics family tree extraordinarily dense and complex. Although Putterman’s academic roots are traced all the way back to Stefan, Boltzmann, Ehrenfest, and Uhlenbeck, it appears that Rudnick’s inspiration was divine in its origin. Traveling forward from my time as a Rudnick‐Putterman graduate student in the mid‐1970s, several clusters of my academic siblings (fellow graduate students and post‐docs) can be identified that exerted a strong influence on acoustics research and education at the Naval Postgraduate School and Penn State, many of whom were influenced by the Swift‐Wheatley‐Migliori (Thermoacoustics) Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.