Russell James Donnelly, a pioneer in the study of classical and quantum fluids, died from pneumonia on 13 June 2015 in Eugene, Oregon.
Born on 16 April 1930 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Russ received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from McMaster University. He earned his PhD, titled “On the hydrodynamics of liquid helium,” in 1956 from Yale University. His advisers, C. T. Lane and Lars Onsager, would leave an indelible mark on his career. Lane’s insistence that “each one teach one” instilled in Russ a lifelong ethic of cultivating young scientists. Among those he mentored was future Nobelist David Lee.
Recruited by the University of Chicago, Russ rose quickly to the rank of professor. But in 1966 he took a position with the University of Oregon because of Chicago’s infamous anti-nepotism rule, which blocked his wife Marian, an art historian, from a faculty position. Russ twice chaired the physics department at Oregon and oversaw its impressive growth, while Marian did the same in art history. He maintained an active research program to his death.
Russ’s remarkable impact on physics began at Chicago during that heady post–World War II period when US physics was ascendant. He worked closely with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; with Dave Fultz, Russ provided experimental support for Chandrasekhar’s seminal work on hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic instabilities. After his move to Oregon, Russ launched an intense period of research on superfluid flow and some of the exotic features of helium II, such as rotons and quantized vortex rings. During that time Russ, with William Glaberson and Peter Parks, published Experimental Superfluidity (University of Chicago Press, 1967), which is still a pocket-sized bible for experimentalists entering the field. During a sabbatical at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Russ and his student James S. Brooks compiled a list of the properties of liquid helium; that work culminated with their 1977 article “The calculated thermodynamic properties of superfluid helium-4,” an exhaustive resource on helium properties.
Extending his work with Chandrasekhar into decades of experiments on classical fluids, Russ became an expert on Taylor–Couette flow; he referred to it, in his inimitable way, as “the hydrogen atom of fluid dynamics” because it was an excellent system for studying flow instabilities and turbulence. Russ and his students explored variations on the classical Couette cylindrical geometry, including applying a Coriolis force to break the axial symmetry, which confirmed an elegant prediction of the onset of Taylor vorticity and a novel set of instabilities leading to chaos. Those investigations and his broader interest in turbulent flows with high Reynolds and Rayleigh numbers fueled Russ’s long-standing and close connections with Guenter Ahlers’s group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and with Harry Swinney’s group at the University of Texas at Austin.
Russ’s bold and optimistic leadership at the intersection of classical and quantum hydrodynamics led him to organize numerous conferences, including the 60th-anniversary Taylor Vortex Flow Workshop and the Conference on Quantized Vortex Dynamics and Superfluid Turbulence. He also coordinated nine Oregon Conferences on Low Temperature Physics and the 20th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics.
Russ had faith that almost any problem could be solved if put in the hands of a good experimentalist. Many of his ideas for addressing particularly vexing problems came during his frequent bicycle rides around the Eugene campus area and affectionately became known as “bike-path ideas.” His life of service, however, left a legacy that goes well beyond his laboratory and his beloved Schwinn.
Upon arriving in Eugene, Russ founded the Pine Mountain Observatory, which continues to operate as a research and teaching telescope. He was also committed to the cultural life of Eugene. In the 1970s he helped broker an agreement among the county, the school district, the city, and the university to build Eugene’s new science museum and planetarium, the Science Factory. Russ loved music and was a supporter and board member of the renowned Oregon Bach Festival and the Oregon Mozart Players. But perhaps his most generous gift is the one he and Marian, who died in 1999, gave to the American Physical Society (APS) to endow the Lars Onsager Prize. The capstone of Russ’s career as a scientist and teacher was the PBS NOVA series Absolute Zero, which he relentlessly pushed into production while leading its science and education advisory committees.
Russ served on the editorial boards of Physics of Fluids, Physical Review A, Physical Review E, and the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data. He contributed to the AIP Physics Desk Reference and was particularly proud that it elegantly unified physics. Russ gave decades of service to the APS division of fluid dynamics, including holding various positions on its executive committee from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s. Among the honors he received were the 1975 APS Otto Laporte Award, the 1996 Onsager Medal and Lectureship from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and the 2002 Fritz London Memorial Prize. Yet of all his achievements, he was most proud of the “family” of 25 PhDs he supervised.
Russ lived with gusto. He appreciated those around him and was known to offer guests his famous “Russell Martini,” before dining at one of Eugene’s fine restaurants. After rekindling his earlier friendship with Joyce Benjamin, with whom he had founded the Science Factory, they married in 2006. The two were inseparable in their travels, whether taking an exotic cruise or hosting the annual Onsager Prize dinner at the APS March Meeting. Russ had a vast overlapping network of family, friends, colleagues, and collaborators. We deeply miss his generosity and his friendship.
