student’s viewpoint of f. v. hunt

3
Student's viewpoint of F. V. Hunt F. Gilman Blake Executive Offriceof the President, Officeof Science and Technology, Washington, D.C. 20506 (Received30 March 1973) The author pays a personal tribute to Ted Hunt as a friend and as a stimulating, thought-provoking, and effective teacher. SubjectClassification: 05.60; 10.85, 10.60. Some time ago, when John Bouyoucos asked me to say a few words about Ted Hunt as a teacher, I readily as- sented. I certainly qualified as one of his students, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate. But when I sat downa few days ago to think aboutwhat I might say, fore an audience of his students, his colleagues, his sponsors, his friends, and even those who have only read his papers, I realized that I'would be carrying oil to Kuwait. What could I possibly say that you didn't al- ready know ? You are all qualified as his students, in one way or another. Source material for this paper, while not voluminous, is rich. For statistics, there is Ted's Final Report from the Acoustics Research Laboratory to the Office of Naval Research, issued in 1970. For biographical material, there are the papers written by John Bouyou- cos in 1965, when Ted was awarded the Pioneers of Underwater Acoustics Medal, and the one by Leo Ber- anek in 1969, when Ted received the Society's Gold Med- al. T ed's response on the latter occasion and the ONR Final Report provide insights into his own views on teaching. But the richest source by far is mine alone: a store of memories reaching back to 1935. For that reason I trust you will forgive me for making this a very personal tribute to Ted Hunt. Yet when I speak of what he did for me--or to me--I am but a surrogate for many , others. How many others ? I don't know really, becausethere is no way of counting how many there were whose lives he touched. The numbers formally registered as his students can be counted. I am not going to cite a lot of statistics, but about 300 took his graduate courses in acoustics, while about 50, including 17 who stoppedat the Master's level, obtained their graduate degrees un- der his guidance. Approximately 15 more did pre- or postdoctoral work at ARL. Leo Beranek has the distinc- tion of being Ted's first Ph.D. So far as I know, I am the only one to receive four degrees under his watchful eye. I believe that my goodfriend Mu. rray Rosenberg is the only one that has earned five Harvard degrees, in- cluding two doctorates, but his first was obtained largely while Ted was otherwise occupied at the Harvard Under- water SoundLaboratory, and his last was an M.D. from the Medical School. A bear for punishment! The number of Ted' s doctorateswas not impressively large, but their post-doctoral careers have been rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Aglance at their biographies in the ONR Final Report will convince you of that, even though it does not include his seven distin- guishedprewar Ph.D. 's. The number of graduate stu- dents at any one time varied from two to eight, averag- ing about four. I made a stab at determining the aver- age number of full-time-equivalent years spent. by each studentin obtainingthe doctorate, but I gave it up as too complicated. There is ample evidence that Ted was not interested in running a quickie diploma mill, as his stu- dents-some a bit ruefully--can amply testify! So much for the cold statistics. What kind of a teacher was he? His course lectures were models of precision, organization, and rigor, insofar as the constantly chang- ing state of the art permitted. We can all remember the looseleaf lecture notes that he laid on the table and oc- casionally consulted. Not many had the opportunity to study them as closely as I did, when I borrowed them for one semester to give his course while he was away on sabbatical leave. They were sufficiently complete, detailed, and well organized to be published as a textbook just about as they were, although Ted didn't seem to think so, in spite of many precedents. It is T ed's less formal teaching methodsfor which he will be best remembered, however. He taught by asking questions, by stimulating the student to think for him- self, even, on occasion, by outrageous goading. Wheth- er he consciously adopted this method from the beginning or whether it just came naturally I cannot say. But he certainly recognized it as his method of supervision, as he called it. Perhaps, during his early days in Barnes- ville, Ohio, he learned how to get a horse to drink after leading it to water. I quote from his remarks on super- vising the research of graduate students, upon the oc- casion of his receiving the Gold Medal Award: "One of the first requisites is to have available to dangle in front of prospective researchers a broadand challenging collection of problems that clamor for so- lution. This requirement is easier to satisfy than mightbe expected at first. Students keepbringing up questions in class and elsewhere;and sincethe teach- er can't answer mostof them, the unsolved problems just accumulate." At this point I need hardly interrupt to point out that Ted was characteristically too modest. Many of the most challenging problems I am sure originated or ma- tured in his own fertile, questioning mind. To resume the quotation: "If the problem inventory can be kept replenishedin this way, and if the supervisory mind can be kept open, 1242 J.Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57,No. 6, Part I, June •1975 Copyright ¸ 1975 by the Acoustical Society ofAmerica 1242 Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 137.189.170.231 On: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 14:41:22

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Page 1: Student’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

Student's viewpoint of F. V. Hunt F. Gilman Blake

Executive Offrice of the President, Office of Science and Technology, Washington, D.C. 20506 (Received 30 March 1973)

The author pays a personal tribute to Ted Hunt as a friend and as a stimulating, thought-provoking, and effective teacher.

Subject Classification: 05.60; 10.85, 10.60.

Some time ago, when John Bouyoucos asked me to say a few words about Ted Hunt as a teacher, I readily as- sented. I certainly qualified as one of his students, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate. But when I sat down a few days ago to think about what I might say, fore an audience of his students, his colleagues, his sponsors, his friends, and even those who have only read his papers, I realized that I'would be carrying oil to Kuwait. What could I possibly say that you didn't al- ready know ? You are all qualified as his students, in one way or another.

Source material for this paper, while not voluminous, is rich. For statistics, there is Ted's Final Report from the Acoustics Research Laboratory to the Office of Naval Research, issued in 1970. For biographical material, there are the papers written by John Bouyou- cos in 1965, when Ted was awarded the Pioneers of Underwater Acoustics Medal, and the one by Leo Ber- anek in 1969, when Ted received the Society's Gold Med- al. T ed's response on the latter occasion and the ONR Final Report provide insights into his own views on teaching. But the richest source by far is mine alone: a store of memories reaching back to 1935. For that reason I trust you will forgive me for making this a very personal tribute to Ted Hunt. Yet when I speak of what he did for me--or to me--I am but a surrogate for many

,

others.

How many others ? I don't know really, because there is no way of counting how many there were whose lives he touched. The numbers formally registered as his students can be counted. I am not going to cite a lot of statistics, but about 300 took his graduate courses in acoustics, while about 50, including 17 who stopped at the Master's level, obtained their graduate degrees un- der his guidance. Approximately 15 more did pre- or postdoctoral work at ARL. Leo Beranek has the distinc- tion of being Ted's first Ph.D. So far as I know, I am the only one to receive four degrees under his watchful eye. I believe that my good friend Mu. rray Rosenberg is the only one that has earned five Harvard degrees, in- cluding two doctorates, but his first was obtained largely while Ted was otherwise occupied at the Harvard Under- water Sound Laboratory, and his last was an M.D. from the Medical School. A bear for punishment!

The number of Ted' s doctorates was not impressively large, but their post-doctoral careers have been rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Aglance at their biographies in the ONR Final Report will convince you of that, even though it does not include his seven distin-

guished prewar Ph.D. 's. The number of graduate stu- dents at any one time varied from two to eight, averag- ing about four. I made a stab at determining the aver- age number of full-time-equivalent years spent. by each student in obtaining the doctorate, but I gave it up as too complicated. There is ample evidence that Ted was not interested in running a quickie diploma mill, as his stu- dents-some a bit ruefully--can amply testify!

So much for the cold statistics. What kind of a teacher

was he? His course lectures were models of precision, organization, and rigor, insofar as the constantly chang- ing state of the art permitted. We can all remember the looseleaf lecture notes that he laid on the table and oc-

casionally consulted. Not many had the opportunity to study them as closely as I did, when I borrowed them for one semester to give his course while he was away on sabbatical leave. They were sufficiently complete, detailed, and well organized to be published as a textbook just about as they were, although Ted didn't seem to think so, in spite of many precedents.

It is T ed's less formal teaching methods for which he will be best remembered, however. He taught by asking questions, by stimulating the student to think for him- self, even, on occasion, by outrageous goading. Wheth- er he consciously adopted this method from the beginning or whether it just came naturally I cannot say. But he certainly recognized it as his method of supervision, as he called it. Perhaps, during his early days in Barnes- ville, Ohio, he learned how to get a horse to drink after leading it to water. I quote from his remarks on super- vising the research of graduate students, upon the oc- casion of his receiving the Gold Medal Award:

"One of the first requisites is to have available to dangle in front of prospective researchers a broad and challenging collection of problems that clamor for so- lution. This requirement is easier to satisfy than might be expected at first. Students keep bringing up questions in class and elsewhere; and since the teach- er can't answer most of them, the unsolved problems just accumulate."

At this point I need hardly interrupt to point out that Ted was characteristically too modest. Many of the most challenging problems I am sure originated or ma- tured in his own fertile, questioning mind. To resume the quotation:

"If the problem inventory can be kept replenished in this way, and if the supervisory mind can be kept open,

1242 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June •1975 Copyright ¸ 1975 by the Acoustical Society of America 1242 Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 137.189.170.231 On: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 14:41:22

Page 2: Student’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

1243 F.G. Blake: Student's viewpoint • 1243

the student can safely be offered his 'druthers' in the selection of a research task. And nothing promotes initial application to the task so much as letting the student have his own way when he says, 'I druther work on this problem than that one.

"Then, with the problem attack launched, what the supervisor needs is an inexhaustible supply of 'whynchas.' Students soon learn, even as we all must, that the apparatus on the bench, or the experimental setup, is not always identical with its conceptual or symbolical representation... what needs to be learned, of course, is that the real problem is to find out how the real-life situation differs from the idealization that

works just fine. It is in the pursuit of these differ- ences that the supervisor must never be at a loss to suggest, 'whyncha try this ?' or 'whyncha try that ?'; or, in extremis, the supervisor may occasionally have to fall back on ß whyncha figure that one out for your- self? '"

Parenthetically, I again interrupt to note that I got more than my share of that last question, when my re- search on cavitation led me deeply into the intricacies-- and absurdities--of the theory of the liquid state as it was being promulgated at that time. Ted's wide-rang- ing interests permitted him to adopt a rather broad def- inition of what constituted the field of acoustics, but there are limits. That problem didn't stump him for a minute, however. He managed to sneak some "ringers" from the "pure" Physics Department into my oral ex- aminations. That was one of several occasions when

something else that he taught me stood me in good stead: to say, "I don't know, "when I didn't.

Ted insisted on much more than simply collecting data or making an experiment work properly. His students had to understand what they were doing and the meaning of their results, and to demonstrate this by clear ex- position. To him fuzzy thinking, as evidenced by poor exposition, was anathema. To conclude the quotation:

"If everything goes no worse than usual, one can hope that the work will eventually reach the stage that calls for translating the results into a form of English suitable for publication. At this point it is usually later than the supervisor thinks; but there is one thing he can do, and must not fail to do: that is to keep challenging the drafts on the manuscript at every turn of a phrase with the unanswerable comment, ' Oh, if that's what you meant, why didn't you just say so ?'"

Ted was speaking of his supervisory philosophy at the Acoustics Research Laboratory, where his product was primarily researchers and secondarily research, rather than of his management practices at the wartime Har- vard Underwater Sound Laboratory, where the priorities were reversed. I was not associated with him at HUSL, but I would be surprised if his supervisory methods there were very much different from those he used at ARL. At any rate I can testify that his theory of research man- agement, with some modifications to suit my own idio- syncracies, served me well for many years at an in- dustrial research laboratory.

How to think for oneself is not the only skill that Ted taught. He also taught his students not to stand in awe of the "establishment," 'sometimes by the sink-or-swim method, if you will pardon a slightly mixed metaphor. I could recount a number of personal experiences, but restrict myself to the first one. When I was an under- graduate d{tring the Great Depression, Harvard College could afford the luxury of the so-called tutorial system of instruction, beginning in the sophomore year. Ted's first assignment to me, when I became one of his ear- liest tutees in 1935, was to study a just-published intro- ductory textbook in acoustics. I found and listed a num- ber of errors in the book, not all merely typographical, which Ted transmitted to its author, an esteemed elder statesman of the Society. Shortly thereafter, at my first ASA meeting, which happened to be in Cambridge, he in- troduced me to the distinguished professor as "the man who found all the mistakes in your book"--and thereupon Ted scurried away to leave me, a somewhat flabbergast- ed 18 year old, to face the music by myself. In all honesty I must add that Ted knew his man as well as his boy. Professor Floyd Watson could not have been more gracious.

There were some who thought Ted's methods to be, shall we say, a bit Draconian. I know better. And I speak as one who has been labeled--not li- beled- by no less a person than one of the President's Science Advisers as a "hard-nosed sonofabitch from in-

dustry." For those who responded, Ted would really go to bat. He never took credit for, or hardly even men- tioned, his behind-the-scenes efforts, but they must have been monumental. How else could he, then a very junior member of the Harvard faculty, obtain for an as- tonished student election to the Junior Eight of Phi Beta Kappa, a baccalaureat summa cum laude, and a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship ? I know enough about university politics to realize that that was no mean accomplishment on his part.

Ted could also be a deeply sympathetic friend. He, and Kay too, helped me and my young family over some pretty rough spots after the war while we were strug- gling to get through graduate school, but perhaps those stories are a bit too personal to recount here.

I can't resist telling one more anecdote, however. Many have remarked upon Ted's seemingly boundless energy, despite his non-too-robust physical health and the punishing hours he kept. I think I know at least part of his secret. When it was time to relax and get some rest, he could really pull the main switch, but fast! The second time he took me to an ASA meeting, in 1947 in San Diego, he offered to share his hotel room with me--at that time, students got transporation expenses, but not subsistence. When we finally quit talking that 'first night, he switched off the light and, within ten sec- onds at most, he was snoring at an estimated SPL of 100 dB. Despite my training in the methodology of ex- perimental science, I never had the fortitude to repeat that observation.

I can find no better way to sum up what made Ted Hunt such a great teacher than to rearrange a bit the words

J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975

Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 137.189.170.231 On: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 14:41:22

Page 3: Student’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

1244 F.G. Blake: Student's viewpoint 1244

that he inscribed on the flyleaf of a book that he gave to me some years ago. He •vrote,

For F. Gilman Blake, prize student and staunch friend, with the author's compliments, F. V. Hunt

What better epitaph than

F. V. HUNT

PRIZE STUDENT

AND

STAUNCH FRIEND

J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975

Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 137.189.170.231 On: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 14:41:22