Hans Bethe -- Nobel Laureate, Mentor, Teacher. (April 8, 2005)

CREDIT: SOL GOLDBERG CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Last month TFW reported on the death of the physicist Hans Bethe aged 98. In this week's Science Freeman Dyson, the eighty-one year old physicist and mathematician at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and one of Bethe's and Richard Feynman's graduate students (1947), writes his obituary. Below are two paragraphs.

When our elected members of the federal government debate what to do with Australia's higher education sector it might be worthwhile their recalling Dyson's assessment of his mentor and Cornell University's physics researcher and teacher.

On Bethe's desk at Cornell University, where he lived and taught for almost 70 years, there was always a pad of paper that he used for calculations. His door was usually open; students and colleagues came in constantly to discuss a wide variety of problems. Bethe would instantly switch his attention from his own problem to theirs. As soon as they left the room, he would instantly switch his attention back and continue his calculation where he had left off.

He continued to pour out a stream of research papers while carrying a full load of teaching and administrative duties and supervising an army of graduate students. When I was one of his graduate students, he came every day to eat lunch with us at the student cafeteria, sharing our problems and telling stories of his adventures in Germany and in Los Alamos. We learned even more at the lunches than we did at his lectures. Everyone called him Hans. He told us that one of the best things about moving from Germany to America was that nobody in America called him "Herr Professor."