Memorial to Paul Francis Kerr 1897—1981 PHILIP M

Memorial to Paul Francis Kerr 1897—1981 PHILIP M. BETHKE U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia 22092 Paul Francis Kerr, Newberry Professor of Mineralogy Emeritus at Columbia University and a former vice- president of the Geological Society of America, died on February 27. 1981, at Stanford University Hospital, Palo Alto, California, after a heart attack. He is sur vived by his two daughters, Ruth Elizabeth Kerr Jakoby of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and Nancy Ann Kerr Del Grande of San Leandro, California, and three grand sons. His wife, Helen Squire Kerr, predeceased him in September 1978, and a son, Paul Squire Kerr, died while a young man. With Paul F. Kerr’s death, the profession lost one of its most successful educator- administrator-scholars, and his former students lost their most steadfast teacher-counselor-mentor-friend. Paul Kerr was born January 12, 1897, in Hemet, California. He entered Occidental College in the fall of 1915, using savings acquired through work in the fields and orchards of the San Jacinto Valley. He financed the later part of his college career by an assistantship in chemistry. Although his studies in chemistry and mathematics were interrupted by a brief period of military service, he graduated with his class in June 1919. The following fall he entered Stanford University with an assistantship to Professor Theodore Hoover, brother of the President. Although he began his studies in mining engineering, he soon switched to geology and came under the tutelage of Professor Austin Flint Rogers. Rogers introduced him to Professor D. L. Webster of the Physics Department, with whom he constructed a multiple X-ray diffraction unit, which he proceeded to use in work for his doctoral dissertation entitled “The Determination of Opaque Ore Minerals by X-ray Diffraction Patterns.” This work, coming only a few years after the demonstrations by Debye and Scherrer in Germany and by Hull in America of the usefulness of the powder diffraction method, was one of the pioneering applications of the technique to problems of mineral identification. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1923, Kerr replaced Rogers for the fall term at Stanford while Rogers was on leave. Kerr was offered a temporary position as lecturer in mineralogy at Columbia for the spring term and moved to New York to begin what was to be a 41-year association. Shortly after Kerr’s arrival at Columbia, Professor Luquer, whom he was assisting, suffered a severe heart attack, and Kerr took over the responsi bilities of the mineralogy program; shortly thereafter, he became a permanent member of the faculty, rising to the rank of full professor by 1940. He became Newberry Professor of Mineralogy in 1959. After his retirement from Columbia in 1965, the Kerrs returned to California where he was a consulting professor at Stanford until 1977. He remained active in research, advising graduate students and consulting until the time of his death. The final paper in his bibliography. “Reminiscences in Applied Mineralogy,” was presented for him by D. M. Hausen as the keynote address to the American Institute of Mining. Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers Symposium on “Process Mineralogy: Extractive Metallurgy. Mineral Exploration, Energy Resources” in Chicago just one day 2 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA before his death. His final illness, coming just a few days before the symposium, prevented him from presenting the paper himself. Paul Kerr’s scholarly interests had as their underlying theme the application of min eralogy to problems of geology, engineering, and industrial processing. Indeed, his many contributions in that area led D. M. Hausen and W. C. Petruk to refer to him, in an editors’ footnote to his final paper, as the “Father of Applied Mineralogy in this country.” Although Paul Kerr’s researches were as broad as mineralogy itself, three main areas particularly captured his attention early and held it for the duration of his career: clay mineralogy, the mineralogy of ore deposits, and the development of mineralogical techniques. Kerr’s fascination with clay minerals began early in his career when C. S. Ross sent him about a dozen samples on which to test the usefulness of X-ray diffraction techniques in clay mineralogy. Kerr’s results confirmed Ross’s conclusions based on optical studies and thus began a long and fruitful association between the two. Their collaborative studies provided the first firm bases for distinction between clay-mineral species and culminated in the first modern classification of clay minerals. It was natural that Paul Kerr should assume the leadership of the American Petroleum Institute’s Project 49: Clay Minerals Standards program, which provided a set of clay-mineral standard samples from a large number of “type” localities. For each locality, a set of physical, chemical, optical. X-ray, and other data was collected by 23 specialists working in 10 different laboratories. Paul Kerr’s interest in clay minerals was not limited to systematic mineralogy, however, but extended to the application of clay mineralogy to the solution of a variety of geologic problems. He was especially concerned with (1) the “quick clays” and their role in landslides and slope stability, an interest that occupied him particularly during the last years of his career, and (2) the clay mineralogy o f hydrothermal alteration haloes, an application to one of his other great loves, ore deposits. The classic alteration studies of the Santa Rita and Silver Bell porphyry copper deposits by Kerr and his students formed only a part of Kerr’s contribution to the understanding of the genesis of ore deposits. His studies of tungsten mineralization in the western United States, which began in the mid- 1930s with a comprehensive investigation at Mill City, Nevada, culminated in Memoir 15 of the Geological Society of America, Tungsten Mineralization in the United States, which was published in 1946. The study of the uranium mineralization at Marysvale, Utah, by Kerr and his students was published in 1957 as Special Paper 64 of the Society. Kerr’s interest in uranium mineralization dated back to the early days of the Manhattan Project, when the interest in the availability of raw materials caused him to be sent to the Katanga district of what was then the Belgian Congo, where, upon his recommendation, and that of Philip Merritt, the famous Shinkolobwe Mine was reopened. Similar missions sent him to the Eldorado Mine at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and to many localities in the United States. A long association with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission followed, leading to a series of studies by Kerr and his students on various aspects of uranium mineralization in and around the Colorado Plateau. Kerr’s involvement with uranium was only in part as a researcher. In 1945 he was selected by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to chair a commission charged with investigating problems associated with the international inspection of fissionable mate rials, and in 1955 he set up, on behalf of the United Nations, a program on raw materials for the First International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva, and edited the volume resulting from that program. The techniques of mineral analysis were one of Paul Kerr’s major interests, starting with his thesis project on the application of X-ray diffraction techniques to the identifica tion of opaque minerals. His textbook, written with his mentor Rogers, was published in MEMORIAL TO PAUL FRANCIS KERR 3 1933 as Thin-Sectiort Mineralogy; the revised edition was retitled Optical Mineralogy and was published in 1942. The third and fourth editions were extensively revised and published under Kerr’s name alone in 1959 and 1977, respectively. Generations of students, many of them now retired, were introduced to the use of the petrographic microscope by this text, and it still continues to sell at the rate of well over a thousand copies per year! Although differential thermal analysis (DTA) had been applied to clay minerals as far back as 1913 and was widely utilized in the 1940s, the systematic studies of Kerr and his co-workers, along with those of Ralph Grim and of Toshio Sudo, gained acceptance of the method in clay-mineral studies. Kerr and his students made significant contributions to the development and improvement of DTA instrumentation. With J. Lawrence Kulp, he designed a multiple DTA unit in which a number of samples could be analyzed simultaneously under the same heating program, a technique that proved particularly useful in the study of clays. With Otto C. Kopp, he adapted the apparatus to provide for the analysis of materials, such as sulfides, which yielded corrosive decomposi tion products, an adaptation which he and J. A. Dunne later improved. Always on the lookout for new methods that could be applied to mineralogical problems, Kerr was among the first to implement such techniques as infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence in his laboratory. Kerr’s contributions to systematic mineralogy included his efforts with C. S. Ross in straightening out the nomenclature of clay mineralogy, the first description (with others) of the new minerals alleghanyite, cattierite, dickite, hydrotungstite, sengierite, tungo- melane, umohoite, and vaesite, and the publication of a prodigious amount of definitive data on a wide variety of minerals. It is simply not possible to document herein all the applications of mineralogy to which Paul Kerr contributed. He had a continuing interest in many other areas including gems and gemology, the so-called spark plug minerals, such as dumortierite, and the mineralogy of saline deposits. His bibliography boasts more than 250 entries, only the most important of which are listed in the Selected Bibliography below. A complete bibliography through 1965, compiled by Marjorie Hooker, is published in the American Mineralogist, volume 50, no.

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