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 extended to this day by Seth Putterman, brought the formalism and techniques of classical acoustics to problems in the quantum mechanics of condensed matter systems. In doing so, Izzy advised 32 Ph.D. students who 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 can be 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-1970’s, 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 and were influenced by the Swift-Wheatley-Migliori (Thermoacoustics) Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.