An Article by Peter Miodownik
Appreciation of Larry Kaufman Lifetime
Achievement V2 10/08/11
My personal contact with Larry started about forty years ago, around the time that the idea of Calphad community first came into being. I had come into contact with his work some ten years earlier, but papers are dry and desiccated things compared to personal contact! At that time he was still largely an unrecognised pathfinder, ploughing a relatively lonely furrow, but continually hopeful for the future. It was, and is, rare to find someone with such a single-minded determination and a great privilege to watch his early work come to fruition in such a spectacular way.
In these days of incredibly powerful personal computers it is sobering to realise that the seeds of the Calphad Procedure lay in an aged and creaking IBM machine fed with punched cards and whose limited powers severely restricted the functions that could be programmed. It was however sufficient to allow Larry to carry through the brilliant idea that a list of standardised phase stabilities for each crystallographic arrangement could be made the keystone of a new thermodynamic approach, at a time when it was not at all commonplace to consider that all elements were capable of allotropy under the right circumstances. It was really exciting to see living proof that ideas are more important than the available hardware for the development of new paradigms, although it is clear that smarter electronics.have enabled all of us to push the boundaries of the Calphad Technique ever forward.
Throughout the time I have known him, Larry has always been an impressive net-worker with his colleagues all over the world. An indefatigable letter-writer, mostly writing by hand in a characteristic style, filling every available space annotating text with comments on every available margin. This tendency spilled over into a rather idiosyncratic method of using a rapid succession of overheads. These were so densely packed with information that it was sometimes very difficult to absorb, or even see, what was being displayed before it was replaced by another equally dense set of data.
I was fortunate to have been given access his private correspondence which shows how difficult it was to shift the phase diagram community away from its pre-occupation with electron-atom ratios and band theory as construed at the time. He corresponded tirelessly with proponents of the electron theory current at the time, such as William Hume-Rothery and Leo Brewer, who did not believe in the values of the phase stabilities nor that a combination of such values could be successfully married with simple solution models.
This battle continued for decades It is truly remarkable that Larry was never discouraged by this opposition; he just patiently chipped away at their objections, firm in the knowledge that they would come round to see that his point of view was ultimately based on experimental evidence and that all theoretical approaches needed to examine their assumptions. Larry was in fact always very keen that agreement should be reached between various approaches and an extended correspondence withDavid Pettifor was followed by the suggestion that I should
visit him at the Cavendish Laboratory
where he was working at the time. That encounter gradually led to an increasing
number of physicists attending Calphad Meetings and an eventual resolution of
the differences that had divided the two communities for such a long time
My personal contact with Larry started about forty years ago, around the time that the idea of Calphad community first came into being. I had come into contact with his work some ten years earlier, but papers are dry and desiccated things compared to personal contact! At that time he was still largely an unrecognised pathfinder, ploughing a relatively lonely furrow, but continually hopeful for the future. It was, and is, rare to find someone with such a single-minded determination and a great privilege to watch his early work come to fruition in such a spectacular way.
In these days of incredibly powerful personal computers it is sobering to realise that the seeds of the Calphad Procedure lay in an aged and creaking IBM machine fed with punched cards and whose limited powers severely restricted the functions that could be programmed. It was however sufficient to allow Larry to carry through the brilliant idea that a list of standardised phase stabilities for each crystallographic arrangement could be made the keystone of a new thermodynamic approach, at a time when it was not at all commonplace to consider that all elements were capable of allotropy under the right circumstances. It was really exciting to see living proof that ideas are more important than the available hardware for the development of new paradigms, although it is clear that smarter electronics.have enabled all of us to push the boundaries of the Calphad Technique ever forward.
Throughout the time I have known him, Larry has always been an impressive net-worker with his colleagues all over the world. An indefatigable letter-writer, mostly writing by hand in a characteristic style, filling every available space annotating text with comments on every available margin. This tendency spilled over into a rather idiosyncratic method of using a rapid succession of overheads. These were so densely packed with information that it was sometimes very difficult to absorb, or even see, what was being displayed before it was replaced by another equally dense set of data.
I was fortunate to have been given access his private correspondence which shows how difficult it was to shift the phase diagram community away from its pre-occupation with electron-atom ratios and band theory as construed at the time. He corresponded tirelessly with proponents of the electron theory current at the time, such as William Hume-Rothery and Leo Brewer, who did not believe in the values of the phase stabilities nor that a combination of such values could be successfully married with simple solution models.
This battle continued for decades It is truly remarkable that Larry was never discouraged by this opposition; he just patiently chipped away at their objections, firm in the knowledge that they would come round to see that his point of view was ultimately based on experimental evidence and that all theoretical approaches needed to examine their assumptions. Larry was in fact always very keen that agreement should be reached between various approaches and an extended correspondence with
The current international nature of CALPHAD
is taken for granted, but in the early days political battles had to be fought
to obtain funds for even just bi-lateral collaboration. It is not usually
realised that, quite apart from his role as the initiator of the Calphad
Approach, Larry also spent a great deal of time behind the scenes to acquire and
manage the necessary funds required to kick-start the Calphad Meetings. All
those who have organised such meetings will know that it is virtually
impossible without the knowledge that there is financial backing to make
advance bookings and subsidise key speakers.
Larry was, of course, also the major force
behind the concept of a journal which would demonstrate the power of the
Calphad method. It was no easy task to persuade Pergammon that there was going
to be a sufficient market based on a new
methodology, with which the scientific community was not entirely in agreement
at that time. Moreover as editor in chief for a long time, he had to make sure
that the proofs of each copy was delivered on time and monitor the standard of
the papers.
None of this could have happened without
Larry’s great capacity for multi-tasking. He really was capable of handling many
problems simultaneously. I particularly remember Harvey
During my spell at ManLabs, Larry also
demonstrated another form of
multitasking and showed that time could
be persuaded to multiply itself by easting and working simultaneously.
Larry was always convinced that there was
no system that could not be handled, no metastable condition that could not be
incorporated, and no boundaries between subjects such as chemistry, geology
physics and ceramics. Practioners in all these fields were invited to Calphad
Meetings at one time or another. His thorough grasp of the unity underlying
thermodynamic parameters meant that he was a past-master at coupling apparently
unrelated information and extracting missing parameters to his data base. The
relatively neglected pressure variable is a case in point. Applications in the
field of martensitic transformation and even radiation damage became fruitful
areas of research and led to my own research group to successfully apply the
calphad approach to that most metastable
condition of them all, namely amorphous alloys.
LK was quite happy to take on board
developments in methodology which required a substantial switch from the model
with which he started. He really enjoyed the developments made under the guidance of his
old friend Mats Hillert at RTI in Stockholm
Retirement is of course a word that is not
in Larry’s vocabulary. He must be one of the few people who voluntarily spend part
of their “retirement” By entering an academic institution [MIT] rather than retiring
FROM it….
It is with utmost sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Larry Kaufman on December 2 in Israel. He was the founder of CALPHAD, the father of Materials Genome, our mentor, colleague, and dear friend.
Flowers/cards/letters can be sent to
Valerie Farber c/o Sandra Kaufman
7 Har Nevo St.
Hashmonaim Israel 73127
http://www.calphad.org/
It is with utmost sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Larry Kaufman on December 2 in Israel. He was the founder of CALPHAD, the father of Materials Genome, our mentor, colleague, and dear friend.
Flowers/cards/letters can be sent to
Valerie Farber c/o Sandra Kaufman
7 Har Nevo St.
Hashmonaim Israel 73127
The CALPHAD Board is working on establishing a scholarship fund under his name and publishing a special CALPHAD issue dedicated to him. More information to come.
It is with profound sadness and grief that I and the computational thermodynamics fraternity of India receive the news of the passing away of Dr. Larry Kaufman. For several generations to come, Dr Larry Kaufman will be remembered for his outstanding contributions towards the evolution of the CALPHAD method. The invention of the organized and structured CALPHAD method was a stroke of genius and only today are we able to realize its full potential with the advent of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering. He could think far ahead of his times.
I and all of my colleagues at CSIR-NML pay our deepest condolences to him and pray for his departed soul to rest in peace.
Regards
S.Srikanth
Director
National Metallurgical Laboratory
Jamshedpur - 831 007, India
Tel: +91-657-2345202/2345028 Fax: +91-4657-2345213
I and all of my colleagues at CSIR-NML pay our deepest condolences to him and pray for his departed soul to rest in peace.
Regards
S.Srikanth
Director
National Metallurgical Laboratory
Jamshedpur - 831 007, India
Tel: +91-657-2345202/2345028 Fax: +91-4657-2345213
Best regards,
John Morral
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