New York Times
May 9, 2001
Arthur Walker, 64, Scientist and Mentor, Dies
By LAMES GLANZ
Dr. Arthur Walker, who shot innovative telescopes into space to give scientist a view of the Sun that they had never seen before and who spent a lifetime helping women and minority students find carers in science, died on April 29 at his home on the campus of Stanford University. He was 64 and a professor of physics and applied physics there.
The cause was cancer, said his wife Victoria T. Walker.
Dr. Walker experienced the subtle and not-so-subtle barriers he later fought on behalf of younger colleagues and students. After he was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science in New York, he was discouraged from becoming a scientist by a teacher who told him the prospects for blacks in science were bleak.
As a professor at Stanford, Dr. Walker was mentor to a long list of students of all backgrounds who went on to prominent positions. His first doctoral student, Dr, Sally K. Ride, became the first American woman in space when she flew on the shuttle Challenger in 1983.
"He instilled confidence, and made me believe that I could accomplish what I set out to accomplish," said Dr. Ride, a professor of physics at the University of California in San Diego.
With the coterie of colleagues, Dr. Walker is credited with helping Stanford produce more blacks physicists with Ph.D's than any other university in the nation, said Dr. Keith Jackson, associate director of the Center for X-ray Optics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and president-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the faculty and provost at Stanford and President Bush's national security adviser, said Dr.. Walker's intellectual legacy was multifaceted. " He was an inspiration for generations of young physicists and worked tirelessly to increase the number of under represented minorities untaking graduate work in the sciences," Ms. Rice said.
Dr. Walker's scientific research focused on radiation from the Sun called extreme ultraviolet light and soft X-rays, which affect the chemistry of Earth's upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer. In the late 1970's, Dr. Walker became interested in what was then considered a risky and untested concept, called multilayer technology, for making special telescope mirrors that could reflect that radiation.
He worked with other scientists to develop the technology for use in space, and was rewarded in 1987 when one of his rocket flights returned the first of a spectacular series of pictures of the Sun and its blazing corona as seen in those radiation bands. One of those pictures landed on the cover of the journal Science on September 30, 1988.
Dr. Loren Acton, a solar physicist at Montana State University and a member of the American Astronomical Society, said the scientists instantly recognized that a new window on the Sun and its behavior had been opened. "When that picture was showned at an A.A.S. eeting for the first time, the audience broke into applause" Dr. Acton said.
Arthur Bertram Cuthbert Walker II was borned in Cleveland on August 24, 1936. His father was a lawyer and his mother Hilda, was a social worker and a Sunday school teacher. Hilda Walker's father, who had immigrated to the United States from Barbados, founded the Advocate, an African-American newspaper, in Clevand in the early 1900's.
In 1941 Arthur Walker's family moved to New York, where he attended an elementary school in the Sugar Hill area of Harlem until his mother became dissatisfied with the quality of the teaching there and had him transferred to another district. She encouraged him to take the entrance exam for the Bronx High School of Science, which he passed.
His interest in science blossomed there, but he also encountered a new challenge when one of his teachers painted a bleak picture for a black scientist in the United States, suggesting that Arthur Walker might have better luck in that career in Cuba. Again his mother stepped in.
She paid a visit to the school and told him in no uncertain terms that her son would study whatever her wishes, "Victoria T. Walker said. After that, Arthur Walker's scientific career soared. He received a bachelor of science degree in physics with honors, from the Case Institute of technology of Illinois in 1957 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois in 1962. His doctoral research was on the production of particles called pi mesons by bombarding helium with powerful X-rays.
Dr. Walker soon became interested in X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and he eventually collaborated with other scientists to fire the multilayer mirrors into space. The technology is now in wide use, and is aboard two major NASA satellites, in Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer.
President Ronald Reagan named Dr. Walker to the commission that studied the causes of the Challenger explosion in 1986 and determined that it could have been prevented. He also served on many other technical panels while continuing his work for minority students - and anyone else who took exception to the often strange customs of academe.
" He was a model to the rest of us black faculty at Stanford in the way he attracted students, not all of whom were minorities," said Dr. Ewart A. C. Thomas, a professor of psychology at Stanford.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Walker is survived by a daughter, Heather M. Walker of Los Altos Hills, California; two stepsons, Nigel D. Gibbs of Los Angeles and Eric D. Gibbs of Temecula, California; and four grandchildren.
Dr, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics and a professor at Stanford, said that the stacks of paper in Dr. Walker's office might have taken top honors in a discipline famous for messy offices. But Dr. Chu said Dr. Walker's ability to find just the document he was looking for illustrated other aspects of his personality.
"The idea that he could find anything in that office struck me as amazing." Dr. Chu said. "He had a knack for seeing through all the clutter."
