John David Jackson has Died

Via Steve Hsu, J D Jackson, he of the dreaded but inevitable (green, red, or blue) E&M book and problem sets, has died at age 96. Steve tells this story of an encounter when both were at Berkeley:

When I entered graduate school at Berkeley I asked to place out of the required course in advanced electrodynamics, which was taught by Jackson using his famous book. I had lecture notes from the course I had taken at Caltech from Mark Wise, which also used the book. Jackson borrowed the notes for a few days, looked through them carefully, and returned to me a short list detailing topics in which my education had been deficient. I was to study those topics, but was excused from the course.

Jackson's dissertation supervisor was Weisskopf, and his doctoral students included Gordon Kane and Chris Quigg.

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