Posted on Jan 18, 2002

The College recently received a $3.1 million gift from Gordon Gould '41, of Southampton, N.Y., the inventor of the laser.

A previous gift of $1.5 million from Gould established the R. Gordon Gould Professorship of Physics in 1995. The professorship, which is held by Jay E. Newman, was established to honor Frank Studer, a former professor of physics at the College who sparked Gould's interest in the physics of light and inspired a love of optics that led to Gould's development of the laser.

President Roger Hull, announcing the most recent gift, said, “Union is incredibly fortunate to have the support – again – of Gordon Gould. As the inventor of the laser, Gordon has had an impact on all of us; as one of Union's strongest supporters, Gordon will long have an impact on generations of students.”

Gould, who idolized Thomas A. Edison as a child and always wanted to be an inventor, was a physics major and member of Sigma Chi fraternity at Union. He did graduate research in optics at Yale, where he taught physics to pre-med students, and was a doctoral student and research assistant at Columbia when he developed the basic concept of the laser.

He is acknowledged as the pioneer of the laser, and he was elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991. Union recognized Gould's achievements by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 1978, and the Eliphalet Nott Medal in 1995.

Posted on Jan 18, 2002

Perhaps it was inevitable that Davide Cervone would become a mathematician working at the intersection of math and art.

As a young boy, he idolized Leonardo da Vinci. And just like the artist-engineer of the Renaissance, Cervone carefully recorded his observations in a series of notebooks. As a teenager, he was captivated by Star Wars. But while most of his contemporaries gazed in awe as X-wing fighters zoomed around the Death Star, Cervone was wondering about the mathematics that made those scenes possible. The movie inspired him to work out a method of drawing 3D pictures, which he used to graph a 3D picture of his family's living room.

Years later at Brown University, Cervone's mentor and Ph.D. advisor, Tom Banchoff, asked him to write a polyhedral modeling program. Cervone used the ideas he developed in high school to write the program in graduate school.

Cervone, assistant professor of mathematics, is the artist-mathematician behind a number of colorful pieces in an exhibit titled “Intricate Perceptions,” a collaborative show in the second-floor lounge of the Social Sciences Building. The exhibit also features up-close photography by Patrick O'Rourke, formerly of Mandeville Gallery, and prints of fractal geometry by artist Jonathan Leavitt. The opening reception is Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 3:45 p.m., during which Cervone will discuss his work.

Intriguing and colorful, Cervone's images have appeared as cover art on a number of mathematical journals and books. All based on mathematical equations, the images depict four- dimensional objects in various ways. In one, a swirl of vibrant colors rotate around a point. In another piece, a sphere is turned inside-out, intersecting with itself.

Other of Cervone's work, in collaboration with Banchoff, can be seen in a “virtual gallery” on his Web site. The viewer can click on the “walls” to see the works, the artist's comments and movies of the images as they rotate. The URL is: http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/art/PAC-9603/. Cervone developed the software for generating the images.

Cervone, on the faculty at Union since 1996, earned a bachelor's degree from Williams College, and a Ph.D. from Brown University.

Posted on Jan 18, 2002

Video farewell

Colleagues of the departing Dave Grzybowski decided against the usual going away cards.

Instead, they're sending the facilities director off with a video memory book composed mainly of “friends” recalling his addiction to the gym, his organizational skills and his ultra-clean desk.

The video was produced by Jay Willis and Jim Moore, who gathered the footage in their spare time.

A number of colleagues used the opportunity to put in last-minute “video work orders” (some of which have been completed) or to complain about the temperature in their buildings. One wore fake glasses and a nose. Another blew a whistle, loudly.

“We thought this would be a great way to send him off,” said Willis. “These are the Union memories. He can just pop it in the VCR.”

A campus farewell reception is planned for Friday, Jan. 18, at 3:30 p.m. in Hale House.

Grzybowski, at Union since 1990, is leaving to become national operations manager at Aspen Square Management, a property management firm based in Springfield, Mass.

Posted on Jan 11, 2002

Seth Greenberg, Gilbert Livingston Professor of Psychology, was the featured speaker before a group of Reach Out and Read (ROAR) volunteers and officials including Albany Mayor Gerald Jennings at the Albany, Schenectady and Troy association of ROAR. He spoke on “Methods for Improving Reading One to One.” ROAR is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Northeastern NY to help elementary school children improve their reading skills. Volunteers – including many Union students – spend an hour or more a week tutoring children from generally economically-needy areas. Greenberg also presented a paper with Jessica Zuehlke '01 on bilingual reading patterns. The paper, “Bilinguals detect letters in orthographies of both known languages,” explores how bilinguals process lexical homographs that appear in both of their fluent languages. Thus, “or” is a conjunction in English, but a content word meaning “gold” in French. The paper discusses whether English/French bilingual readers responding to a printed word can suppress one meaning of the word while activating the other. The paper was presented at the Psychonomic Society meeting in November, where Greenberg chaired a session on “Lexical Effects.”

Posted on Jan 11, 2002

Robert Fleischer, research professor of geology, is lead author (with S. Fujita and M. Hoshi) of a paper, “Hiroshima Neutron Fluence on a Glass Button From Near Ground Zero” in a recent issue of Health Physics, the radiation safety journal. Fleschier and his colleagues measured uranium fission tracks in a piece of silicate glass that was at ground zero during the Aug. 6, 1945 atomic detonation to determine levels of radiation exposure. Fleischer has solicited pieces of glass for dosimetry research, but most were either too distant from the explosion or altered by the heat of the blast. Also, Fleischer is author (with Robert Doremus of Rensselaer) of another paper in Health Physics, “Uncertainties in Retrospective Radon Exposure of Glass: Possible Effects of Hydration and of Leaching.” The paper considers the present techniques for using an embedded radioactive isotope 210Pb in glass to measure exposure to radon and its prompt decay products. Fleischer and Doremus point out that effects of water are probably sources of error, but subject to future checking to avoid glass compositions that are unreliable.