Richard Crandall papers

Richard Crandall was born in 1947. He came to Reed in the fall of 1967 as a third-year transfer from Caltech, at the suggestion of a boyhood friend who was then a mathematics major at Reed. At Caltech, Richard had attended classes taught by Richard Feynman, who—both stylistically and substantively—exerted a lifelong influence upon much of Richard’s work. At Reed, Richard wrote—then lost at Lutz’s Tavern, then redrafted—a physics thesis written under the direction of Professor Nicholas Wheeler and also—unbeknownst to anybody—a second thesis in mathematics, which was signed by Professor John Leadley. Additionally, he contributed to—by his own count—the theses of eight of his friends.

Richard took his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor (and second lifelong influence) was Victor Weisskopf. Through Weisskopf—who did postdoctoral work with Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Pauli—Richard could trace his intellectual ancestry directly to the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.

While still a graduate student, Richard—who always harbored a strong entrepreneurial proclivity—created three firms concerned with the design, manufacture and installation of security systems. Those firms were acquired by a major corporation concerned with the ergonomic management of skyscrapers, so for a time he inhabited an office high in Manhattan’s RCA building. After returning to Portland he cofounded, with Jean Delord of the physics faculty, a firm that designed, built and sold modems. And still later he created Perfectly Scientific, Inc., a firm that marketed special-purpose algorithms and provided scientific consulting services. And collaterally: PSI Press, a novel (mainly technical) print-on-demand publishing house.

Richard came to the Reed faculty in 1978 as a visiting experimental physicist—fruit of the same search that brought David Griffiths to the physics faculty as a theorist. When he recommended Richard's appointment, Wheeler recalled Bertrand Russell’s remark that “Getting to know Wittgenstein had been the great intellectual adventure of his life,” and speculated that many students and faculty at Reed had a similar adventure in prospect. So it proved to be. Richard retired from the physics faculty in 1992 as Howard Vollum Professor of Science. Until his death he served as Vollum Adjunct Professor of Science and also as founding Director of the Reed College Center for Advanced Computation. During the years 1983-1987 he (on leave from the physics faculty) directed the 5-Year Master Plan for Computer Resources, which brought about the “computerization” of the Reed campus.

Richard’s classes were always freshly conceived, often radically original (and often taught at strange nocturnal hours). For example: he divided his Junior Lab class into teams, each charged with designing and constructing this or that component of a system to send computer data by optical link from the physics building to Eliot Hall (then the site of the IBM 1600 mainframe). With thesis students he devised novel methods to measure the fundamental constants of physics. A bench-top measurement of the mass of the photon (accuracy of Coulomb’s Law) remained the most precise on record for more than twenty years. Richard was unapologetically dismissive of students who approached their work in a perfunctory way, but gave himself heart and soul to students who showed a spark of creativity, on whose behalf he often worked through the night.

Richard E. Crandall died on 20 December 2012 at the age of 64, of acute myeloid leukemia.