Leon Knopoff (1926–2011)

Abstract

Leon Knopoff died at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., on 20 January 2011 at the age of 85. A man of wide‐ranging talents, he had the rare distinction of being simultaneously a professor of physics, a professor of geophysics, and a research musicologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As an undergraduate he studied electrical engineering and obtained his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1949. He was recruited to the Institute of Geophysics (now the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics) at UCLA in 1950 by Louis Slichter, where he became a professor of geophysics in 1957 and of geophysics and physics in 1961. He became a research musicologist in the UCLA Institute of Ethnomusicology soon after it was formed in 1960. Other appointments included faculty positions at Miami University in Ohio (1948–1950) and Caltech (1962–1963) and visiting appointments at Cambridge, Karlsruhe, Harvard, Santiago, Trieste, and Venice.