Keith Randolph Symon (March 25, 1920 – December 16, 2013) was an American physicist working in the fields of

accelerator physics Accelerator physics is a branch of applied physics, concerned with designing, building and operating particle accelerators. As such, it can be described as the study of motion, manipulation and observation of relativistic charged particle beams ...

and

plasma physics Plasma ()πλάσμα
, Henry George Liddell, R ...

. Symon graduated summa cum laude,

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...

, from

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1942 with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. In 1948 he was awarded a PhD in Physics. He taught physics at

Wayne State University Wayne State University (WSU) is a public research university in Detroit, Michigan. It is Michigan's third-largest university. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 350 programs to nearly 25,000 ...

in Detroit until 1955. Symon was professor of physics at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

until his retirement in 1992 when he became emeritus professor. From 1956 to 1967 he was on the staff of the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), a collaboration of Big Ten universities, the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

and Notre Dame. In 1982 and 1983 he was acting director of the Madison Academic Computing Center and from 1983 to 1985, acting director of the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center. His textbook, "Mechanics", has been a staple in physics classes since publication of the first edition in 1953. It has been published in multiple languages and is still in use around the world. Symon was awarded the Particle Accelerator and Technology Award of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Society in 2003. With four colleagues from around the country, he published "Innovation Was Not Enough -- A History of the Midwestern Universities Research Association", in 2010. He was an internationally recognized figure in plasma physics and particle accelerator design. He contributed to the work at Fermi Lab, Argonne National Laboratory (he chaired the Argonne Accelerator Users Group in the 60s), Brookhaven National Lab, labs in Los Alamos and La Jolla, and did early research for the Hadron collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he and his family lived for a year in 1962-1963. His work took him to Europe, Japan, China, India, Russia, and Australia. He taught himself useful French, German, Dutch, Russian, and some Chinese. He is known for the development of the

FFAG accelerator A Fixed-Field alternating gradient Accelerator (FFA; also abbreviated FFAG) is a circular particle accelerator concept that can be characterized by its time-independent magnetic fields (''fixed-field'', like in a cyclotron) and the use of alternat ...

concept in parallel to

Tihiro Ohkawa was a Japanese people, Japanese physicist whose field of work was in Plasma (physics), plasma physics and fusion power. He was a pioneer in developing ways to generate electricity by nuclear fusion when he worked at General Atomics. Ohkawa died S ...

and

Andrei Kolomensky Andrei, Andrey or Andrej (in Cyrillic script: Андрэй , Андрей or Андреј) is a form of Andreas/Ἀνδρέας in Slavic languages and Romanian. People with the name include: *Andrei of Polotsk (–1399), Lithuanian nobleman *And ...

. He worked for the

Midwestern Universities Research Association The Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA) was a collaboration between 15 universities with the goal of designing and building a particle accelerator for the Midwestern United States. It existed between 1953–1967, but could not achiev ...

with

Donald Kerst Donald William Kerst (November 1, 1911 – August 19, 1993) was an American physicist who worked on advanced particle accelerator concepts (accelerator physics) and plasma physics. He is most notable for his development of the betatron, a novel ...

and received the

APS APS or Aps or aps or similar may refer to: Education * Abbottabad Public School * Adarsh Public School, a public school in New Delhi, India * Alamogordo Public Schools * Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico, US school district * Allendale Publ ...

Robert R. Wilson Prize The Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators is an annual prize established in 1987 by the American Physical Society (APS) to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement, ordinarily by one person but sometim ...

in 2005.

References

1920 births 2013 deaths Accelerator physicists Harvard University alumni People associated with CERN Fellows of the American Physical Society Wayne State University faculty University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty {{US-physicist-stub