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A Tribute to William Kaula, 1926-2000 |
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 William
M. Kaula, Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at UCLA, lost his long
and heroic battle against cancer on April 1, 2000. He was born in Sydney,
Australia, and as a youngster travelled with his family to New Zealand,
Holland, and the US, finally spending most of his youth in Massachusetts.
He attended the US Military Academy at West Point and graduated with a
BS in Military Engineering in 1948. There followed several years of military
service and studies at Ohio State University where he obtained an MS in
Geodesy in 1953. He moved quickly from Chief of the Division of Geodesy
of the Army Map Service to Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center to Professor of Geophysics at UCLA. Though he retired in 1993,
he remained as active and productive as ever until almost his last day.
William Kaula was one of the leading geophysicists and planetary physicists
of the last three decades. He was the author of two pioneering and influential
books, Theory of Satellite Geodesy (1966) and Introduction to
Planetary Physics (1968). He published over 250 papers on a broad
range of subjects, including gravity fields of the Earth and the terrestrial
planets, their interior structures and dynamics, and their dynamical evolutions.
His papers dealt with tides, chaotic dynamics, planetesimal distributions,
accretion of terrestrial planets, formation of the solar system, origin
of the Moon, and comparative planetology. Bill was influential not only
as a researcher and teacher— he also served the academic and scientific
communities with boundless energy and dedication. He was a frequent participant
in NASA missions, as team leader for the laser altimeter on Apollos 15,
16, and 17, and team member for the radar and gravity experiments on the
Magellan spacecraft. He was chief of the National Geodetic Survey of NOAA,
editor of two major scientific journals, and chair of numerous academic
and professional scientific committees. He served as Chair of both the
Geophysics and Space Physics and the Earth and Space Sciences departments
at UCLA, President of the Geodesy Section of the American Geophysical
Union, and Chair of the Division of Dynamical Astronomy of the American
Astronomical Society. He also served twice as a member of UCLA’s Council
on Academic Personnel.
Bill’s scientific contributions were recognized by numerous honors and
awards, including Fellowship in the American Geophysical Union, an honorary
Doctor of Science from Ohio State University, and the NASA Medal for exceptional
scientific achievement. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences,
and received the Whitten Medal of the American Geophysical Union and the
Brouwer Medal of the American Astronomical Society. In 1996 the asteroid
#5685 was officially named "Kaula." Bill was particularly proud of two
achievements. He was the first person for a period of fifteen years to
receive a tenured appointment in the physical sciences at UCLA without
a PhD degree—there has been no other such appointment since. He was also
the first graduate of West Point to be elected to the National Academy
of Sciences since George Squires, Chief of the Signal Corps in 1919.
Among Bill's many scientific interests was the dynamics of the giant
outer planets. He believed that a certain peculiarity of our solar system
might lead to complex behavior in its orbital properties. Every time Jupiter
makes five complete orbits around the sun, Saturn makes almost exactly
two orbits and again lines up with Jupiter and the sun. This near coincident
return of the orbits is known as a "resonance," and Bill was especially
interested in how this resonance, which he was fond of calling the "Great
Inequality," could affect the smaller Uranus and Neptune. He was convinced
that while the Great Inequality would complicate their orbital properties,
the natural order of our solar system would be preserved. In recent years,
Bill became interested in the claim that the outer solar system was chaotic,
a claim he thought was nonsense. It is fashionable to describe systems
whose long term behavior is extremely sensitive to their initial behavior
as being chaotic. If this were true, the solar system might be expected
to change over billions of years. Shortly after his death, his collaborators
presented (posthumously with Bill) a joint paper proving the lack of validity
of this claim. While the Great Inequality, and Bill’s con-tributions to
its understanding, remain a hallmark of modern planetary science, we like
to think that one of Bill’s last contributions was to restore some order
out of the chaos in our understanding of the outer solar system.
Bill was not only an extraordinary scientist, but an extroardinary person,
as well. He was highly knowledgeable about many subjects besides science—literature,
art, music, and food, to name a few. He will be sorely missed by his children,
grandchildren, wife Gene Hurley Kaula, friends, and colleagues. Bill’s
office at UCLA will be converted into a combination Seminar/Reading Room.
The goal will be to keep many of Bill’s things intact there, while providing
much needed space in the Department of Earth & Space Sciences for seminar
classes and studying. Contributions can be designated to the UCLA Foundation/ESS
for the William M. Kaula Memorial Fund, and sent to the UCLA Department
of Earth & Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567, Attn: Barbara Widawski,
or to the American Geophysical Union, Executive Offices, 2000 Florida
Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20009, in honor of William M. Kaula.
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