David Halliday, coauthor of one of the most widely used elementary physics textbooks, died of cardiac arrest on 2 April 2010 in Maple Falls, Washington.
Halliday was born in Manchester, UK, on 3 March 1916 and grew up in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a steel town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. After graduating from Homestead High School in 1934, he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he received a BS in 1938 and a PhD in 1941, both in physics. His PhD thesis was titled “Some Coincidence Experiments in Nuclear Physics.”
After conferring his PhD, Pitt awarded Halliday a Buhl Foundation fellowship for the 1941–42 academic year, so that he could continue his nuclear physics research. During World War II, however, Halliday worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. In 1945 he returned to Pitt as an assistant professor; he was rapidly promoted to associate professor in 1947 and...
