A REMEMBRANCE OF ADOLF PAUL, 12 SEPTEMBER 1995


by Bill Wright

It is a sad task to review my memories of Adolf on this occasion, but those memories are nevertheless a great pleasure in my life, and irreplaceable.

It was at a meeting in Nice (December, 1960), when Alan Shapley told me that Karl Rawer had spoken highly of new ideas about ionogram inversion that had been developed by one of the younger people of his institute at Breisach; I went directly there. My limited German of the time just about equaled, word for word, Adolf's limited English; but I got the basic ideas well enough from him to realize that he had made a major advance over Budden's formulation, which had already led to a sort of cottage industry for ionogram inversion in the USA and UK ... perhaps also in the USSR. Clearly, Adolf knew his worth. He said then, and a few times later, that the best things he had done at Breisach were precisely those that Rawer had told him not to do. Of course we know that Rawer knew better than that, but it was fortunate for us that Adolf was ready and eager to see his ideas implemented.

He came to Boulder by contracts during several successive summers, to work with my fledgling group. I resolved a scheduling conflict in 1962 by asking Adolf to accompany me to Florida to help prepare for a series of chemical- release rocket experiments. We went by train, a gesture, I thought, at letting him see part of the USA in relaxation. Late at night in the train's 'Vista Dome', and with rapidly improving English, Adolf told me of his first long train journey in 1945 as a war-captive slave laborer, into the coal mines of the USSR. He spoke of fashioning chess sets which won the interest of (and slight kindnesses from) the Russian barracks guards. He described improvising resistive heaters from bedsprings to supplement a meager ration of heating coal. In that last year of the war, he had been drafted, hurriedly taught to drive a tank, and promptly (perhaps mercifully) captured; he spent the better part of the next three years underground.

In his scientific work, Adolf had a special ability to see simplifications of complicated problems which he could then put into rigorous form. His profile inversion work included implicit invention, before its time, of the cubic spline. To our surprise, he showed how we could get profile information "top down", starting from the F-peak. He contributed original insights (collaborating with Kurt Suchy) to the theory of radio ray tracing. His method of "Anharmonic Frequency Analysis" does correctly for actual data, what the discrete Fourier transform is too often mis-used to do. He saw the "Gibbs phenomenon" unnecessarily cluttering Rydbeck's (and Budden's) computation of pulse dispersion in the ionosphere; Adolf's formulation avoids the Gibbs effect, and allows us to see the dispersion. We now understand radio phase and group paths much more clearly from his arrangement of their relationships, than yet appears in any textbook. He discovered the stimulation of 'Spread F' by radiowave heating of the ionosphere. His dependable judgment was central to our long and successful development of research digital ionosondes, experience which he carried into U.S. Navy employment after 1982.

Adolf Karl Paul was born 6 March 1926 in the Bavarian village of Engen, not far from the Lake of Konstanz. He was a student at the Gymnasium in Konstanz. After capture and coal mining, he was returned by the USSR to Germany in 1948. By 1954 he had completed his Diplom in mathematics and physics at the Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg, whereupon he joined the Ionosphere Institute at Breisach. He married about that same time, and leaves us with four fine, mature citizens, Regina, Gabriele, Winfried and Wolfgang.

Adolf was enticed to emigrate about 1963 and he joined our diverse group. During a long period, it included all sides, all fortunes and misfortunes of the 1939 - 1945 conflicts, with, so far as I could perceive then or since, no lingering disharmonies: Adolf, Sadami Matsushita, Tatsuo Shimazaki, Walt Plywaski, often Mike Pitteway, and "us Americans" with perceptible roots ... Tom Van Zandt, Leonard Fedor, Ed Violette, Dean McKinnis, Herbert Howe, Rachel Laird, Georgellen Smith, Lois Wescott, Huntley Ingalls, Miriam Clore and myself. To an extent far greater by his generous personality than the rest of us would manage to do, Adolf kept us all his personal and permanent friends.


A personal thought from Tamara Gulyeava

I am deeply upset by the news of Adolf Paul's death. I cooperated with him since 1972 under McCue-Leo McNamara URSI N(h) W.G., and were co-authors of 4 IPS Reports on the N(h)-profiles inversion. When Leo visited me in 1978, before the URSI meeting, Adolf sent me with him a present - records of the opera 'Jesus Christ - Superstar' which I have shared with many neighbours and friends since. In the Russian tradition the value of a man's life is appreciated by 3 criteria: he should beget a child, build a house, and grow a tree. Adolf completed all these criteria, and much more. He had 4 children, built a house in Boulder of 12 rooms, and grew a garden of 12 acres. He promised to show me all these when I had a chance to visit him in Boulder. I missed this chance forever. I first met him at the Helsinki URSI meeting when he was divorced and where he was with his fiancee. Afterwards we met at Budapest COSPAR meeting, he was alone and he invited me for a dinner. Since then he took a picture at all our following meetings, and sent me photographs afterwards. When I asked him to give me a letter of Reference for my Application for grant to MacArthur Foundation, in 1993, re responded at once and gave me a favourable letter. He was a real gentlemen.


Back to Bulletins index Back to INAG-61 Contents page