I see from The Times obits that Brian Pippard has died.
You can refer to the obituary above for who he was and what he did – for me, he was one of a very small number of people who changed the direction of my life. I went up to Cambridge originally intending to read chemistry, but in the first year of a Natural Sciences course, the undergraduate gets equal exposure to several subjects. Within a few months physics seemed a better option.
Despite being an exalted professor, Brian Pippard was one of our lecturers, and his sheer enthusiasm for physics was a major influence on my switching direction. A good man.
He was one of my husband’s lecturers while he was at Cambridge reading physics, also. I didn’t know this until reading the Times obit and mentioning to him that Pippard had died – my only previous knowledge of him was via various dealings at Nature.
As you say, an excellent and enthusiastic physicist, he will be missed.
Although I did 2 years of Physics at Cambridge before defecting to Materials Science, I was never lectured by Brian Pippard. Unless, that is, you include lecture 1, year 1, when he addressed the assembled first year of about 300 and applied statistics to say that there was a 50% chance that one of us would get a Nobel prize in physics. Well he is still correct as no-one there has got one yet (to my knowledge). I remember him best for his “Cavendish Problems in Physics”, a very clever way of making students pay for a list of questions used by tutors. It did not include model answers, just numerical solutions. However, that was thought of as normal in those days (late ’70s).
A sad thought is that he was the first Cavendish Professor in the 20th century not to be a Nobel Laureate, but a trend that has followed his appointment as the centre of gravity of physics has moved west.