Joseph V. Smith 1928-2007

Abstract

Joseph V. Smith was born on the 30th of July 1928, in Derbyshire, England. He married Brenda Wallis at Crich, Derbyshire, on the 31st of August, 1951, moved to the USA, and their family grew with two daughters, Virginia and Susan. He retired in September 2005 as the Louis Block Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences and the College at the University of Chicago. On Friday the 6th of April, 2007, at age 78, he died of pneumonia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Parkinson’s disease had begun to take its cruel toll about five years earlier. He and his wife Brenda moved to Brookline in 2005 to be near their daughter, Virginia, and family, where he suffered a broken hip and several heart attacks before the final event. In the meantime, he continued to write an autobiographical book Living Safely which dealt with local and global problems facing our species. As Brenda said: “He was very strong and very stoic. He handled any difficulties in life the way he handled his illness.” In early April, a reporter from the Boston Globe asked me, by phone, for information about Professor Smith. From my troubled, garbled conversation the reporter recovered the following quotation: “Joe was one of the great mineralogists of his time, both in an intellectual sense and a practical sense. He did first-rate science that was always at the forefront. And he pursued practical applications in a very powerful way. He was also always looking for the next, best way of studying minerals.” His many honours support these statements. These include election as Fellow of the Royal Society of London and member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and award of the Murchison Medal (Geological Society of London), the MSA Award (young scientist award …