Professor Hugh T. Richards died on September 29, 2006. He was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1947, and he retired in 1988. He is survived by his wife Mildred, six children, nine grandchildren and one great grandson.
Hugh was born on November 7, 1918 on a homestead in Baca County, Colorado. He received his B.A. from Park College, and earned his Ph.D. from Rice in 1942, where his research on the detection of fast neutrons made him immediately valuable to the Manhatten project. He spent the war years working at Los Alamos. He then brought Ray Herb's "long tank" pressurized electrostatic accelerator from Los Alamos back to Wisconsin, which was the post-war restart of nuclear physics experiments at Wisconsin.
Hugh started his career at Wisconsin as a Research Associate, was appointed Assistant Professor in 1947, and promoted to Professor in 1952. He served as chair of the Department of Physics from 1960-63, and then as Associate Dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1963-66. In 1966 he accepted a second three-year term as Department Chair. In 1985 the Department of Physics again drafted him to be chair, a position he held until his retirement. Hugh was also chair of a university-wide Physical Sciences Committee from 1958 to 1961 and served on a large number of other university committees as well as panels of the National Science Foundation. His terms as Department Chair spanned a time of great change in the Department of Physics, as the number of graduate students and faculty grew markedly and the research mission expanded.
Hugh conducted an active research program in nuclear physics from the start of his career at Wisconsin until his retirement. During this 42-year span, he directed the research of 49 Ph.D. students and a score of postdoctoral fellows from the US and abroad. In his early work, he developed methods to determine nuclear reaction energies to a new level of accuracy. The main thrust of his research was to carry out precision measurements designed to study and classify the energy levels of light nuclei. His data were a primary source for published tables of energy levels. He and his students pursued a special interest in the extent to which isotopic spin is conserved in light-nuclear interactions, illustrated particularly in the reactions d+12C and d+16O.
Hugh also supervised important work on the development of ion sources, especially the negative H and He ions useful in tandem accelerators. This work included a practical source of He ions using cesium-vapor charge-exchange, as well as major improvements in sputter sources for negative H and heavy ions. Sources of the Richards type are now commonly used for accelerator mass spectroscopy around the world
The tragic Sterling Hall bombing in August of 1970 did a large amount of damage to Sterling Hall and particularly to the research schedule of the nuclear physics group. Hugh served as a special officer of the department in expediting the necessary rebuilding and recovery. Also at that time of trouble Hugh served on a highly visible university committee concerned with the relationship between the university students and war-related industries
As chair of the department, Hugh issued occasional bulletins under the title 'Musings by your Chairman", which revealed his concerns for the department as well as his certain way with words.
Hugh was among the rare individuals who enjoy and excel in research and teaching in equal parts. He treated students and colleagues with warmth and respect. He and Mildred welcomed students to their large home even offering temporary housing to postdoctoral fellows who arrived from abroad. Hugh was always modest about his own accomplishments. Although he invariably contributed greatly to the successful outcome of his students' research projects, he usually declined to have his name listed as coauthor on the resulting journal publication. Hugh enjoyed teaching the introductory course for science majors. He was a master at finding simple classroom demonstrations that would illustrate the subject he was discussing and made sure that the students could see and understand his demonstrations. Hugh will be remembered as a man of wisdom and generosity, a respected colleague skilled at both research and teaching, and a devoted family man.
