Robert Resnick passed away quietly, surrounded by his family, on 29 January 2014 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Bob was suffering from the various maladies of an advanced age and from mourning the recent death of Mildred, his wife of 67 years.
Bob had a remarkable career as a physicist, physics educator, and author, and his textbooks became the gateway to physics for generations of scientists and engineers. Physics for Students of Science and Engineering, written with David Halliday, was released in 1960 by Wiley (see Halliday’s obituary in Physics Today, January 2011, page 66). The textbook is now in its 10th edition, under the title Fundamentals of Physics, and has had several additional coauthors. That classic and Bob’s seven other physics textbooks have been translated into more than two dozen languages and used by an estimated 10 million physics students worldwide.
Born on 11 January 1923 in Baltimore, Maryland, Bob studied physics at the Johns Hopkins University, from which he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1943 and PhD in 1949. His dissertation, “Theory of the angular distribution of the nuclear reaction Li6(d,α)α,” was supervised by David Rittenhouse Inglis. Bob began his career as a physics faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh in 1949. There he met Halliday, and they began the collaboration that resulted in the publication of Physics in 1960.
In 1956 Bob left Pitt to become a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); for most of his tenure, he served as the Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Science Education. RPI founded the Robert Resnick Center for Physics Education and created the Robert Resnick Lecture Series to honor his career. At his retirement from RPI in 1993, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) helped organize an international conference on physics education in his honor that drew physicists from around the world. Many of them had been introduced to the subject through Physics and its iterations, which in 2002 the American Physical Society named the “most outstanding introductory text of the 20th century.”
For most of us, being able to mentor a few people is one of the great gifts in life. But Bob, a tremendous teacher, mentored millions—not only us and many of our fellow physicists who interacted with him personally, but countless others through his textbooks.
At the inception of the US International Physics Olympiad team in the mid 1980s, Bob agreed to help train the top 20 students, who were selected through a national exam. On the first day of training, held at the University of Maryland, we asked the students how they came to study physics—in particular, which text they studied from. Not surprising for that time, they all mentioned a version of “Resnick and Halliday.” Then one of us introduced Bob, “the flesh and blood version.” The response to his entrance could probably only have been rivaled by introducing a pop star to a group of preteens.
Bob’s reputation knew no geographic or political boundaries. As part of the improvement in US–China relations in the late 1970s, Bob was part of the team that helped set up physics exchanges. During his time in China, he discovered that many of the physicists and science students he met, regardless of what country they were from, had studied from his text. Bob never minded that he did not get royalties in some countries. He was simply glad that students had the opportunity to learn.
Bob was also a collector of limericks in every form—from the most scientific to the most inappropriate—and published a book and several articles on them. He was a legend among the students at RPI. One group of students, who considered themselves experts in limericks, invited Bob to a limerick duel. The students were long exhausted when Bob was just hitting his stride. He also once gave an exam in which the students were asked to complete limericks about physics. His ability to come up with a limerick on the spot for virtually any person’s name often left his listeners astounded—and occasionally shocked!
In 1975 AAPT honored Bob with its highest honor, the Oersted Medal. He served as an officer in the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and AAPT, including as its president in 1987–88. His time as an honorary visiting professor to the People’s Republic of China in 1981 and again in 1985 helped to reinforce the growing physics cooperation between the US and China.
Bob and Mildred regularly attended concerts at the Tanglewood music venue in Massachusetts and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York. His love for classical music was only exceeded by family, physics, and limericks—in that order. He still found time to be a passionate fan of the Baltimore Orioles and an ardent supporter of his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. Whatever he accomplished was always aimed at helping someone else to succeed. At that he was an enormous success.
