Theodore David Schultz, a theoretical physicist and science education advocate, died of cancer on 20 September 2004 in Washington, DC.
Born in Chicago on 6 January 1929, Ted lived in the city’s northern suburbs. As a teenager, he was a contestant on the radio show Quiz Kids, and when he was 16, he attended the small Deep Springs College near Death Valley, California. He continued his undergraduate studies at Cornell University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1951. He then studied with J. C. Slater at MIT and explored the polaron problem using the path integral methods developed by another Cornell graduate, Richard Feynman. Ted pushed that approach to its limits. In 1956 he received his PhD. His thesis, “Electron-Lattice Interactions in Polar Crystals,” was widely read, with more than 2000 copies circulated.
Ted’s subsequent two-year postdoctoral work with Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham, England, led to his now well-known paper on polarons, “Slow Electrons in Polar Crystals: Self-Energy, Mass, and Mobility,” published in Physical Review in 1959. Ted joined the University of Illinois in 1958. During the two years that followed, he worked with John Bardeen, first as a research associate professor and then as a research assistant professor.
He left Illinois to join IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he spent the next 32 years, except for a sabbatical at the University of Munich. Ted started at the research center as a charter member of the theoretical group headed by Elliot Montroll, with Elliott Lieb and Dan Mattis. Particularly productive during those years, Ted wrote the short but elegant book Quantum Field Theory and the Many-Body Problem (Gordon and Breach, 1964), one of the first books on this subject. He worked with Lieb and Mattis on ferromagnetism and anti-ferromagnetism, and they produced probably their best-known paper, “Two-Dimensional Ising Model as a Soluble Problem of Many Fermions,” which was published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1964. That article became a citation classic. Mattis has testified to Ted’s extraordinary role in research while Ted was at IBM—his close cooperation and ability to be a sounding board for ideas—and noted that all ideas relating to many-body problems, including the original XY model of magnetism, were filtered through Ted. From 1964 to 1965, Ted was a visiting adjunct professor at New York University.
Ted enjoyed another period of great productivity from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. He worked primarily with experimentalists on the charge-transfer salt TTF-TCNQ; he published some 20 papers and a book chapter on the subject. Again, he was an important sounding board, and his erudition and critical scientific taste played major roles in that effort. Ted continued to act as a wise sounding board for young theorists who joined the lab in the 1980s.
Ted spent the years 1990–92 as the technical assistant to the director of the physical science department at Yorktown and, during that period, served on two NSF panels on teacher enhancement. Improving elementary science education then became his abiding interest. He believed he needed to do something more.
After he retired from IBM in 1992, Ted moved to the nation’s capital and became the program officer for networking at the National Science Resource Center, a position he held until 1996. He oversaw the production and writing of two sections for the study Resource for Teaching Elementary School Science , published by the National Academy Press in 1996. He then consulted for and subsequently became an employee of the American Physical Society. He worked for the society’s Teacher–Scientist Alliance Institute, which implements sys-temwide reform of science education through intensive five-day institutes. Ted helped produce and lead those institutes. He retired from APS in 2001, at about the time he became ill.
A man of many interests, Ted was very active in the 1960s in Democratic politics in the village of Ossining, New York. He worked with Ossining’s mayor, another theorist from IBM, and helped lead the village into an urban renewal program. Ted also became a leader of the local Friends of Music of Ossining. In no small measure, it is because of Ted’s knowledge and good sense that the organization is healthy and still producing a six-concert chamber music series in a time when dwindling audiences have ended many such enterprises.
Much of Ted’s life centered on his family—his wife of 47 years, Almut, and his two daughters. He was always proud of his daughters’ accomplishments: Jennifer’s work as a teacher of English as a second language abroad and in the US and Andrea’s career as a professional violinist who is devoted to chamber music. Ted was overjoyed by the birth of his second grandchild shortly before he died. For his family, Ted designed and helped build a beautiful contemporary home overlooking the Hudson River. His house was featured in Better Homes and Gardens in 1969.
Ted loved classical music and played the cello and the piano. He enjoyed bridge, tennis, sailing, photography, camping, and cross-country skiing.
Ted’s intellectual curiosity was insatiable and his knowledge was vast. He believed in the rational pursuit of truth and lived passionately according to his ideals. He cared deeply about other people, and his love for others was reciprocated. He is missed very much by his family, colleagues, and many friends.
