With the death of Morton Hamermesh in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 14 November 2003, the world of physics and the University of Minnesota lost a distinguished elder statesman and a dear colleague. He died of complications following a heart attack.
Mort was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 27 December 1915. He received his undergraduate degree, with a major in mathematics, in 1936 from the City College of New York, which later (1966) honored him with the Townsend Harris Medal, reserved for their most distinguished alumni. He obtained his PhD in 1940 at New York University, under the guidance of adviser Otto Halpern. His thesis dealt with the passage of neutrons through crystals and polycrystals; in it, he examined the deviations from the assumed additivity of nuclear cross sections.
Mort continued work on the magnetic scattering of neutrons, with an emphasis on the atomic form factors, while a postdoc with Felix Bloch at Stanford University. He returned to NYU and took a leave of absence to work at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University on problems related to the scattering and absorption of radar. On returning a second time to NYU in 1945, he resumed an old collaboration with Julian Schwinger on the scattering of slow neutrons by ortho- and para-hydrogen and deuterium and obtained results that were important in the determination of nuclear scattering lengths.
Three years later, Mort accepted a position at Argonne National Laboratory, where he soon became head of the physics division. His standards and his vision of how to go about doing science set the direction for the division even beyond the 17 years that he spent at Argonne. He established the style that the prime responsibility of a scientist was to do first-rate science and that it was the role of management to protect scientists from bureaucratic distractions. He was deeply involved with everything that was going on in the division, and he worked on a number of experiments, including a measurement of the electron–neutron interaction. He contributed to postgraduate education at Argonne by his lecture series on group theory, which led to the publication in 1962 of his highly regarded and timely book Group Theory and Its Application to Physical Problems (Addison-Wesley), largely written while he was on sabbatical at ETH Zürich. In 1959, Mort became associate laboratory director in charge of basic research. He continued to involve himself as much as possible in the scientific work being done in chemistry, biology, and materials science.
In 1965, Mort accepted a position as head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. He came at a time when there was a great need to expand the faculty. In a very collegial fashion, he worked with the faculty to start or enhance a number of programs that were previously understaffed: High-energy physics, condensed matter physics, and astronomy began their growth under his direction. Mort left for a year in 1970 to head the physics department at SUNY Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University), but to the great relief of his Minnesota colleagues, he returned to continue to lead the School of Physics and Astronomy through 1975.
Throughout Mort’s tenure as head, he and his wife, Madeline, opened their home to faculty, which enhanced the collegiality in the school. Mort retired in 1985 but continued his activities until shortly before his death. He was editor of the Journal of Mathematical Physics , and he went on extended visits to UCLA and to universities in China, where he spent a year while his wife taught English literature.
In addition to physics and mathematics, Mort had two passions: chess and languages. In chess, he achieved world-class status, coming in sixth in the US Chess Open in 1945. He studied languages all his life. One of the earliest benefits that the physics community had from that passion was his translation of Lev Landau and Evgenii Lifshitz’s The Classical Theory of Fields (Addison-Wesley) in 1951, which alerted many readers to the riches to be found in the books by those authors. Mort’s activity as a translator of Russian physics literature played an important role in creating an awareness of the high quality of Russian physics during a period when normal contacts were blocked because of the cold war. He continued his studies of Mandarin and Hebrew well into his eighties.
Mort made time to eat lunch with his colleagues at the faculty club whenever possible. We relied on him to relay to us the details of the international chess matches that took place every few years, and he served as an impromptu reviewer of books, movies, plays, and concerts. He was only one or two degrees of separation away from the founders of modern 20th-century physics, and he brought to life the personalities that many of us had only read about. Interested in everything, he shared his enthusiasm with colleagues on the faculty and staff. We miss him.
