Sidney Carne Wolff (born 1941) is an American astrophysicist, researcher, public educator, and author. She is the first woman in the United States to head a major observatory, and she provided significant contributions to the construction of six telescopes. Wolff served as Director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). She is a member of the International Astronomical Union's Division G: Stars and Stellar Physics.
Robert J. Weber (1942 in Stout, Iowa – 21 November 2018 in Des Moines) was an American engineer and researcher who specialized in microwave engineering, device fabrication, fiber optics, and sensor design. He was professor emeritus of Iowa State University‘s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).Weber received his Ph.D. from Iowa State in 1967. He worked for Rockwell Collins for 25 years before becoming a professor in 1988. He retired in 2010.
Vivienne Lucille Malone-Mayes (née Malone; February 10, 1932 – June 9, 1995) was an American mathematician and professor. Malone-Mayes studied properties of functions, as well as methods of teaching mathematics. She was the fifth African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics in the United States, and the first African-American member of the faculty of Baylor University.
Jack Justin Stiffler (1934–2019) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and entrepreneur, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers who made key contributions in the areas of communications (especially coding theory) and fault-tolerant computing.
Stuart Wellford Cook (April 15, 1913—March 25, 1993) was an American social psychologist known for his research on the societal effects of racism and religious intolerance. He is particularly known for a study he conducted with Isidor Chein and Kenneth Bancroft Clark on the psychological effects of racial segregation. This study was cited by the appellates in the 1954 landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. His research also focused on many other psychological subjects, including clinical psychology, military psychology, and psychological research methods.
Arthur Hill Cash (February 4, 1922 – December 29, 2016) was an American scholar of 18th-century English literature.Cash is best known as the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Laurence Sterne, published between 1975 and 1986. He also wrote a popular biography of the 18th-century politician John Wilkes, who was influential in developing ideas concerning civil liberties in England and the United States. The book, titled John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, was one of three finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Cash taught university literature courses for forty-five years, including popular classes in the Bible and Greek and Roman literature. He retired from the State University of New York at New Paltz as one of a handful of faculty with the title of Distinguished Professor. Before that he taught at the University of Colorado, the University of New Mexico, and Colorado State University.
Cash was born in Gary, Indiana, and lived in or near Chicago for many years. Starting work as a stage actor, at the beginning of American involvement in the Second World War, he joined the 108th General Hospital unit. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, and completed his graduate education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Columbia University.
He married Dorothy Moore Cash (later Romni Cash) and they had two children before their divorce. Their eldest son was killed in El Salvador in 1992. He married novelist Mary Gordon and they had two children together, now adults.
Carolyn L. Cannon-Alfred (born August 16, 1934 – August 29, 1987) was an American pharmacologist who established a medical clinic in South-central Los Angeles. She was an assistant professor of pharmacology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a senior pharmacologist at Riker Laboratories. Cannon-Alfred co-authored the Medical Handbook for the Layman in 1971.
Carlos Graef Fernández (February 25, 1911 – January 13, 1988) was a Mexican physicist and mathematician. A graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a founding member of the Mexican Mathematical Society and the Mexican Physical Society. He helped to establish the Tonantzintla Observatory and he later directed it. He received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1970.
Donald Delbert Clayton (March 18, 1935 – January 3, 2024) was an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1992) for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of (chemical) elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon burning in stars but he also predicted a new type of astronomy based on it, namely the associated gamma-ray line radiation emitted by matter ejected from supernovae. That paper was selected as one of the fifty most influential papers in astronomy during the twentieth century for the Centennial Volume of the American Astronomical Society. He gathered support from influential astronomers and physicists for a new NASA budget item for a gamma-ray-observatory satellite, achieving successful funding for Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. With his focus on radioactive supernova gas Clayton discovered a new chemical pathway causing carbon dust to condense there by a process that is activated by the radioactivity.Clayton also authored a novel, The Joshua Factor (1985), a parable of the origin of mankind utilizing the mystery of solar neutrinos; a science autobiography and a memoir; and a history of the origin of each isotope, Handbook of Isotopes in the Cosmos (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).
Clayton died on January 3, 2024, at the age of 88.
Kenneth Marshall Watson (September 7, 1921 – August 18, 2023) was an American theoretical physicist and physical oceanographer.