Frederick Reif - Obituaries

Frederich (later Frederick) Reif was born in Vienna, Austria in 1927 to Gerschon Reif, a dentist, and Klara (Chaja Lea) Gottfried Reif, a homemaker, who had come to that city after World War I from their native Poland (until the war the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire). Along with his younger sister Liane (b.1934), they lived very comfortably near the Prater. Fred received violin lessons, in which he excelled (and which would provide a lifelong solace) and began studies at an academic Gymnasium (high school) at age 10.

With the rise of the Nazi regime, and particularly after the November 1938 Kristalnacht pogrom, their lives changed drastically. Fred’s father committed suicide just prior to their departure on the ill-fated S.S. St. Louis, which was bound for Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees, but forced to return to Europe, where Fred, his mother, and his sister disembarked in France. They lived as refugees supported by international Jewish aid in Loudon where Fred learned French, and when the Germans had occupied northern France in Limoges where he attended Lycée. In 1941 they managed to secure a visa and passage to emigrate, sponsored by relatives (Klinghoffer family) in New York. They made their way across Spain to Portugal, where they set sail. As a teenager, with his knowledge of French, Fred assumed a fatherly role in making important decisions for the family.

Fred completed Erasmus Hall high school in Brooklyn, New York and began studies at Columbia University, but at age 18 was drafted into the U.S. Army. After basic training he was tasked with strategic language study and sent to Yale to learn Japanese. Upon completing his service, he returned to Columbia (BA 1948) and continued on to Harvard University to study Physics (PhD 1953). Fred’s first faculty position was in the Physics Department at the University of Chicago where he worked with Enrico Fermi (1953 to 1960), then he was hired as a professor of Physics and Education at the University of California at Berkeley (1960 to 1989), and finally he served as a professor of Physics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (1989 to 2000). Thereafter he held the status of professor emeritus at both UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Fred’s books Fundamentals of Thermal and Statistical Physics (1965), Statistical Physics (Berkeley Physics Series, 1967), and Understanding Basic Mechanics (1995) remain standard texts in the field today. After more than ten years’ research in physics and a dozen important papers on topics such as the quantization of vortex rings and gapless superconductivity, he turned to research in education. He was among the pioneers in the development of the phenomenon of physics education research in the 1960s, a field he was devoted to as “analytical yet humanly compelling.” He also co-founded its first formal, interdisciplinary PhD program, known as the SESAME program (Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education) at University of California, Berkeley in 1969 together with Bob Karplus. At Carnegie Mellon, he was instrumental in introducing numerous educational innovations to the Physics Department, including group work with white boards, undergraduate teaching assistants, and interactive teaching methods like concept tests in lectures to gauge student comprehension (early precursors to today’s “clickers”). He also made a profound, lasting, and much-adored influence on the Science Teaching Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. In 1994 he was awarded the Robert A. Millikan Medal, which recognizes those who have made notable and intellectually creative contributions to the teaching of physics. He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1988 he received a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award. His final book, Applying cognitive science to education: Thinking and learning in scientific domains, was published in 2008 by the MIT Press.

As one of his former students put it, “Fred was distinctively Fred.” He was a singular character whose difficult early years shaped him in profound ways. A pessimist who loved optimists, he spent most of his energies on his considerable professional achievements, but late in life he agreed to recount his Holocaust experiences to Pittsburgh-area high school students. He also had soft spots for teddy bears and bubbly personalities. Fred’s first wife was "queen of carbon science" Mildred Dresselhaus. He is survived by his wife, sociological gerontologist and nurse Laura (Ott) Reif, former wife and cognitive scientist Jill (Larkin) Wellman, his sister and biochemist Liane Reif-Lehrer, brother-in-law and biochemist Sam Lehrer, nephew and artist Damon Lehrer (with his wife Aimee Lebrun and son Nathan Huckleberry Lebrun Lehrer), and niece, cultural anthropologist Erica Lehrer.

In his Millikan 1994 lecture, he acknowledged, with his trademark subtle humor, that "instruction is often far less effective than we realize". Fred set out to find out a rational answer to why this is so, and what can be done about it. In his seminal book on Applying Cognitive Science to Education" (Reif, 2008), he stated: "Science education is not focused on science itself, but on students who are trying to learn scientific knowledge and thinking. A truly scientific approach to education would thus need to strive for a better understanding of the underlying human thought processes and knowledge required for good performance in particular scientific domains". This, he claimed, should lead to the design of more effective instruction that can help students learn. Fred Reif's approach was manifested in his groundbreaking work on knowledge organization, problem solving strategies, interactive teaching, as well as his work on the teaching of thermal physics for introductory level physics students.

His unique ability and commitment to accomplish the above while precisely defining concepts and terms at the level of the science as well as at the level of teachers and students, contributed significantly to physics and science education at large, as well as to our Science Teaching Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Fred was deeply involved in the integration of his ideas into the key research-based curricular and teacher professional development projects taking place in the Department. Many of us define ourselvesin terms of our "collaborative distance" from Fred, whether we were his students, students of his students or grand students. For his students, he was a loving person who treated them as genuine collaborators with whom he could discuss and refine his and their ideas. Hisimpact has made an indelible mark on their personal and professional lives. Remarkably, he served as a mentor and as a colleague also to their students, generously sharing innovative illuminating thoughts and manuscripts.

Already in his first book Fred noted that "an author never finishes a book, he merely abandons it." In his last book he wrote that he hoped that his book would "stimulate some others to do better". The physics education community will carry on his legacy.

Frederich (later Frederick) Reif was born in Vienna, Austria in 1927 to Gerschon Reif, a dentist, and Klara (Chaja Lea) Gottfried Reif, a homemaker, who had come to that city after World War I from their native Poland (until the war the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire). Along with his younger sister Liane (b.1934), they lived very comfortably near the Prater. Fred received violin lessons, in which he excelled (and which would provide a lifelong solace) and began studies at an academic Gymnasium (high school) at age 10.

With the rise of the Nazi regime, and particularly after the November 1938 Kristalnacht pogrom, their lives changed drastically. Fred’s father committed suicide just prior to their departure on the ill-fated S.S. St. Louis, which was bound for Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees, but forced to return to Europe, where Fred, his mother, and his sister disembarked in France. They lived as refugees supported by international Jewish aid in Loudon where Fred learned French, and when the Germans had occupied northern France in Limoges where he attended Lycée. In September 1941 they managed to secure a visa and passage to emigrate, sponsored by relatives (Klinghoffer family) in New York. They made their way across Spain to Portugal, where they set sail. As a teenager, with his knowledge of French, Fred assumed a fatherly role in making important decisions for the family.

Fred completed Erasmus Hall high school in Brooklyn, New York and began studies at Columbia University, but at age 18 was drafted into the U.S. Army. After basic training he was tasked with strategic language study and sent to Yale to learn Japanese. Upon completing his service, he returned to Columbia (BA 1948) and continued on to Harvard University to study Physics (PhD 1953). Fred’s first faculty position was in the Physics Department at the University of Chicago where he worked with Enrico Fermi (1953 to 1960), then he was hired as a professor of Physics and Education at the University of California at Berkeley (1960 to 1989), and finally he served as a professor of Physics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (1989 to 2000). Thereafter he held the status of professor emeritus at both UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Fred's books Fundamentals of Thermal and Statistical Physics (1965), Statistical Physics (Berkeley Physics Series, 1967), and Understanding Basic Mechanics (1995) remain standard texts in the field today. After more than ten years' research in physics and a dozen important papers on topics such as the quantization of vortex rings and gapless superconductivity, he turned to research in education. He was among the pioneers in the development of the phenomenon of physics education research in the 1960s, a field he was devoted to as "analytical yet humanly compelling." He also co-founded its first formal, interdisciplinary PhD program, known as the SESAME program (Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education) at University of California, Berkeley in 1969 together with Bob Karplus. At Carnegie Mellon, he was instrumental in introducing numerous educational innovations to the Physics Department, including group work with white boards, undergraduate teaching assistants, and interactive teaching methods like concept tests in lectures to gauge student comprehension (early precursors to today's "clickers"). He also made a profound, lasting, and muchadored influence on the Science Teaching Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. In 1994 he was awarded the Robert A. Millikan Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers, which recognizes those who have made notable and intellectually creative contributions to the teaching of physics. He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1988 he received a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award. His final book, Applying cognitive science to education: Thinking and learning in scientific domains, was published in 2008 by the MIT Press.

As one of his former students put it, "Fred was distinctively Fred." He was a singular character whose difficult early years shaped him in profound ways. A pessimist who loved optimists, he spent most of his energies on his considerable professional achievements, but late in life he agreed to recount his Holocaust experiences to Pittsburgh-area high school students. He also had soft spots for teddy bears and bubbly personalities. Fred’s first wife was "queen of carbon science" Mildred Dresselhaus. He is survived by his wife, sociological gerontologist and nurse Laura (Ott) Reif, former wife and cognitive scientist Jill (Larkin) Wellman, his sister and biochemist Liane Reif-Lehrer, brother-in-law and biochemist Sam Lehrer, nephew and artist Damon Lehrer (with his wife Aimee Lebrun and son Nathan Huckleberry Lebrun Lehrer), and niece, cultural anthropologist Erica Lehrer.

A memorial website has been created for Fred at gatheringus.com, where personal reflections can be added. A private remembrance ceremony is being planned by the family.

With his fluency in French, Fred assumed a fatherly role in making important decisions for the family. Their temporary safety ended with the German invasion of France in 1941. Fleeing again, they were fortunate to emigrate from France to New York via Portugal that same year.

Following high school in New York, Fred earned a scholarship to Columbia University. He was drafted and served 15 months in the service during the final days of World War II, returning to receive his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1948. He then entered Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in physics under the guidance of Nobel Prize winner Edward Purcell. Then followed an unusual career. The focus of the first half of his career was on study of the properties of matter at low temperatures, while the last half focused on cognition and education research and the intricacies of learning such abstract subjects as physics.

Fred’s thesis at Harvard was a study of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in solid hydrogen. In that work he made the discovery of a magnetic resonance signal without the presence of an external magnetic field. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1953, where he continued NMR studies, culminating in a review article with Morrel Cohen a few years later on quadrupole effects in NMR studies of solids. In his Chicago laboratory he began to focus on studies of superfluid helium. With Lothar Meyer, he discovered a strange phenomenon: the greater the energy of an excess electron in the fluid, the slower it moved — a completely counterintuitive result.

Fred joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960 and continued to follow up on this result. This led to one of his most important discoveries, namely that electrons in liquid helium became attached to microscopic, quantized vortex rings (liquid-flow structures similar to smoke rings). The observations matched precisely a prediction made a decade earlier by Lars Onsager and Richard Feynman. These results, reported by Fred and his student George Rayfield in 1965, still stand today as one of the cleanest experimental confirmations of the predicted behavior of superfluid helium.

Fred’s style of research was characterized by small-scale experiments and a keen focus on fundamental physics. His research group was always small, with just one or two students at a time. In 1962, he and his student Mike Woolf discovered gapless superconductivity. Their work confirmed the 1960 prediction of Abrikosov and Gor’kov for this effect. Gapless superconductivity was quite a controversial concept at the time. Until then, it was common to associate superconductivity with an energy gap in the electron excitation spectrum, but the theoretical prediction of gapless superconductivity was shown to be correct. As his final research in physics, Fred and a student discovered a mobile neutral excitation generated in superfluid helium by alpha particle bombardment. It was an electronically excited helium molecule encased in a bubble in the liquid. Their follow-up experiments shed light on ultraviolet luminescence from noble gas liquids and solids. Their results are now relevant to a current generation of neutrino and dark matter detectors.

In the 1960s, Fred authored his influential textbook, Fundamentals of Thermal and Statistical Physics, a subject important in many areas in physics, chemistry and biology. It is fair to say that his book changed the way this subject is taught. Teachers worldwide still consider it the best undergraduate text for this subject. He also authored an introductory text on this topic for the Berkeley Physics Course, a project funded by the National Science Foundation and designed to improve physics teaching at the introductory college level. He was the recipient of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1971.

It was partly through his textbooks that Fred became interested in finding out how an abstract topic such as physics could best be taught. He realized that less abstract material can be transferred from teacher to student in a straightforward manner by lecturing or reading. However, learning abstract concepts is quite different. It does not involve memory as much as other brain functions, and so understanding how people learn is as challenging a subject as physics itself. This question began to pull him away from physics research and led him to use his physics classes as a laboratory to unwrap the secrets of the psychology of learning. Towards this end, he and Robert Karplus formed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at Berkeley known as SESAME (Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education) in 1969.

Fred joined Berkeley’s School of Education and chaired SESAME in the early 1970s, making the case (before cognitive science was a named discipline) that the rigorous multidisciplinary study of educational issues would be a fertile area for study. This was a novel approach to understand science learning. After 1969, his entire research focus was on the psychology of learning. Fred is regarded as a pioneer in physics education research (PER) beginning with the early article, “Science Education for Non-Science Students” (Science Magazine, 1969). At Berkeley, he chaired the search committee for faculty in the school’s program in Education, Math, Science, and Technology (EMST), the world’s first program in cognitive science and education.

In 1989, Fred moved to Carnegie Mellon University to continue his cognition and education research. There he held joint appointments in physics and psychology until his retirement in 2000. His final book, Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains, was published in 2008.

Fred was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1988 he received a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award; and in 1994, he received the Robert A. Millikan Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) for his work in education research.

Fred regarded himself as a “pessimist who loved optimists.” He spent much of his childhood in fear and most of his adult life conquering the effects of it. Although he was not in danger in the U.S., he was unable to enjoy the lighter things in life such as cars, sports, and other things that his peers were interested in. A solace in life was playing the violin, which he began in Vienna, yet few ever heard him play. While he was a private person, he was open about the struggles he faced in coming to terms with his early life, which included the loss of his father to suicide and subsequently most of his extended family in the Holocaust. Late in life, he agreed to recount his Holocaust experiences to Pittsburgh-area high school students.

For those of us who knew him, he was inspirational in many ways, and his passing is an immense loss. The logic of his thought processes made him a true joy to interact with and learn from. And his dry wit was infectious. In a memorable discussion with another Berkeley professor and a student, he turned to the student and said: “that’s not such a stupid idea.” While it could have been a horrifying remark, the twinkle in his eye indicated that it was high praise indeed (Fred-Reif style) – praise that the student regards with great fondness to this day.

Professor Reif is survived by his wife, sociological gerontologist and nurse Laura (Ott) Reif, his former wife and cognitive scientist Jill (Larkin) Wellman, sister and biochemist Liane Reif-Lehrer, brother-in-law and biochemist Sam Lehrer, nephew and artist Damon Lehrer, and niece, cultural anthropologist Erica Lehrer.

Authors’ notes: Some of the material for this memoriam comes from two obituaries by his niece Erica Lehrer, American Association of Physics Teachers; and Janice Crompton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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