David Sayre Between 1956 and 1990, David He Scored His Own Share of Winning Worked for IBM
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AIP/ESVA, GALLERY OF MEMBER SOCIETY PRESIDENTS Athletic activity formed a major Dorothy Hodgkin. During that time counterpoint to Phil’s science. His var- David and his wife, Anne, got to know sity basketball at MIT continued into Rosalind Franklin, another young crys- pick-up games at Bell Labs, gradually to tallographer who was working at be replaced by tennis, which he played King’s College London. the rest of his active life. He loved the David wrote some of his seminal outdoors, from winter ski trips to papers during 1951–52. He had discov- mountain hikes to weeklong backpack- ered what is known today as Sayre’s ing trips in western wilderness areas. equation, which was the critical step An avid sports fan, Phil followed his needed in the development of direct favorite teams in baseball, basketball, methods in crystallography. His half- and football. Two days before his death, page 1952 paper in Acta Crystallograph- as he sat enthralled by the final tense ica, “Some implications of a theorem moments of the 2012 Super Bowl, he due to Shannon,” forms the foundation made an unprecedented statement: of diffraction microscopy, also known “This has been such a good game that I as coherent diffraction imaging and don’t even care if the Giants lose!” lensless imaging. Sixty years later it is Metaphorically, that summarized his still frequently cited in the literature. life in physics—he loved the game. And David Sayre Between 1956 and 1990, David he scored his own share of winning worked for IBM. He was part of the touchdowns. team that developed Fortran as the first D. R. Hamann tran compiler, and visionary leader in x-ray micro scopy, died of complications high-level language for technical com- Rutgers University puting. He was the first assistant man- from Parkinson’s disease on 23 Febru- Piscataway, New Jersey ager of the Fortran development group Eric D. Isaacs ary 2012 in Bridgewater, New Jersey. and later corporate director of pro- Argonne National Laboratory Born on 2 March 1924 in New York Argonne, Illinois gramming. In 1969, while he was leader City, David received his BS in physics of programming research, he and his David Sayre from Yale University at the age of 19. team showed that the virtual memory During 1943–46 he worked on radar at overlay system worked consistently avid Sayre, a ground-breaking the MIT Radiation Laboratory before better than the best manually con- Dcrystallographer, leader in coher- going to graduate school. He received trolled ones; that put to rest the debate ent diffraction imaging, member his PhD from Oxford University in 1951 over which memory system worked of the team that wrote the original For- in x-ray crystallography, working with best for commercial computers. In 1971 9DFXXP&KDPEHU ([SHUWV 2QH2IIRU3URGXFWLRQ4XDQWLWLHV +LJKRU8OWUD+LJK9DFXXP 6LQJOH:DOORU:DWHU&RROHG )HHWRI0DQXIDFWXULQJ ,62&HUWL¿HG ,Q+RXVH(OHFWURSROLVK &00 5*$,QVSHFWLRQ 1RU&DO3URGXFWV,QF7HO 6RXWK2UHJRQ6W RU <UHND&$86$ ZZZQFFRP obituaries he proposed that IBM’s newly devel- Subsequently, David deepened his David was a superb scientist, a oped electron-beam microfabrication involvement in x-ray microscopy. He warm-hearted colleague, and an excep- technique be used to make Fresnel zone realized that due to the short wave- tional mentor. He is greatly missed. plates for x-ray microscopy. That idea lengths involved, x rays could reach Janos Kirz took a decade to be realized, but it is higher resolution than standard visible- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory now the basis of the rapidly growing light microscopes, and due to the pene- Berkeley, California Chris Jacobsen field of x-ray microscopy at synchro- trating nature of the radiation, x-ray tron light sources worldwide and of microscopes would not be limited to Argonne National Laboratory Argonne, Illinois commercial laboratory instruments use with ultrathin samples, as are elec- Jianwei Miao made by the company Xradia, founded tron microscopes. He worked on con- University of California, Los Angeles by one of David’s first PhD students, tact microscopy at IBM, and later, using Wenbing Yun. the National Synchrotron Light Source In 1972–73 the Sayres returned to at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he Oxford for a sabbatical visit, where helped develop scanning and diffrac- Norbert David immersed himself again in the tion-based microscopes. world of x-ray crystallography in David’s last great scientific contribu- Untersteiner Hodgkin’s lab. It was after James Wat- tion was diffraction microscopy. In 1980 orbert Untersteiner, a pioneer in son had written The Double Helix he realized that synchrotron light polar geophysics, passed away (Atheneum, 1968), in which he treated sources may be powerful enough to pro- N from prostate cancer on 14 March Franklin’s contributions to DNA struc- vide sufficient coherent x rays so that 2012 in Seattle, Washington. Much of the ture determination in a scandalously the diffraction patterns of noncrystalline present interest in the role of the Arctic in dismissive way. That book inspired specimens could be recorded. Those global climate can be traced to Norbert, Anne Sayre to write her own, Rosalind patterns would be continuous and not who founded the modern thermo- Franklin and DNA (Norton, 1975), which restricted to Bragg peaks. David conjec- dynamic theory of sea ice. became a bestseller and went a long way tured that even though only the inten - Born on 24 February 1926 in Merano, toward setting the record straight. Dur- sity could be recorded and not the Italy, Norbert was in Salzburg, Austria, in ing the sabbatical, David met one of us phase, the information could be sam- 1938 when Germany annexed the coun- (Kirz, visiting from Stony Brook Univer- pled on a finer grid than Bragg peaks try. He studied physics at the University sity and, as it turned out, living only from crystals, and that may make the of Innsbruck and completed his PhD the- about 10 miles from David back in the phase reconstruction possible. sis on seiche waves with Albert Defant in US); together they became interested In the 1980s David recorded the first 1950. Norbert then became an assistent to in x-ray microscopy of noncrystalline diffraction patterns from noncrystalline meteorologist and geophysicist Heinrich specimens. samples. After his retirement from IBM, von Ficker in Vienna and honed his David served as an adjunct professor at expertise in glacier mass and radiation Stony Brook University. In the 1990s, balance. Thus it was not surprising that working with Henry Chapman (then a in 1954 he was approached by Reinhard Stony Brook postdoc) and another of us Sander to be a scientific member of an (Miao, then a graduate student), he was expedition to Asia’s Karakoram Range. able to apply James Fienup’s iterative As part of the International Geophys- algorithm to find the phases for a ical Year (IGY), in January 1957 Norbert computer-generated diffraction pat- was appointed by the University of tern. The final breakthrough came Washington (UW) in Seattle as scientific when Miao reconstructed an experi- leader of Ice Station Alpha, one of two mentally recorded diffraction pattern. floating stations in the Arctic Ocean dur- That achievement opened up the field ing that time. By June, Station Alpha was of diffraction microscopy, which is now fully operational, and in 1958 Norbert practiced in various forms at many became one of the few Western scientists x-ray facilities around the world and is to summer over on the ice; he stayed to the basis for single-particle imaging, a November. He then returned to his post prominent experimental program at in Vienna and was awarded the Austrian SLAC’s recently commissioned free- Honorary Cross for Science and Arts, electron laser, at Japan’s SPring-8 syn- and in 1960 he was appointed Dozent, or The magazine of computational chrotron radiation facility, and at the instructor, at the University of Vienna. Fermi FEL in Trieste, Italy. tools and methods. His research through 1961 appeared During his career, David served on mainly in German, but his seminal IGY CiSE addresses large computational the US National Committee for Crys- paper “On the mass and heat budget of tallography, among others. In 1983 he Arctic sea ice” appeared in English. In SUREOHPVE\VKDULQJHIÀFLHQW was president of the American Crystal- 1962 Norbert returned to the UW, and by algorithms, system software and lographic Association, and he received 1967 he was professor of atmospheric computer architecture. its Fankuchen Award in 1989. In 2008, science—he chaired the department at the International Union of Crystal- from 1988 to 1997—and of geophysics. lography’s triennial Congress in He then went to the University of Alaska MEMBERS $49 | STUDENTS $25 Osaka, Japan, he was presented with Fairbanks, where he held the Sydney www.computer.org/cise the organization’s highest award, the Chapman Endowed Chair in Physical http://cise.aip.org Ewald Prize. Sciences from 1998 to 2005. 66 June 2012 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org.