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AMAN OF UNUSUALLY wide-ranging interests and talents, Leon Knopoffhad the rare distinction of being simultaneously a professor of physics, a professor of geophysics, and a research musicologist at UCLA. The only child of Max and Ray Knopoff, Leon was born in Los Angeles on 1 July 1925, and was the first of his extended family to attend college. He died at his home on 20 January 2011.
As an undergraduate he studied electrical engineering (B.S. cum laude, 1944), and obtained his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics (also cum laude) at the California Institute of Technology in 1949. In 1950 Louis Slichter recruited Knopoffto the Institute of Geophysics at UCLA, where he became professor of geophysics in 1957 and professor of both geophysics and physics in 1961. He was appointed research musicologist in the UCLA Institute of Ethnomusicology shortly after it was formed in 1960. Other appointments included faculty positions at Miami University of Ohio (1948-50) and Caltech (1962-63) as well as visiting academic appointments at Cambridge (three separate yearlong visits), Karlsruhe, Harvard, Santiago, Trieste, and Venice. He was awarded an NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1960, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1976.
Knopoffwas elected as a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1962), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1963), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1964), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965), and a member of the American Philosophical Society (1992). A true international scientist, he received the Emil Wiechert Medal of the Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft(1978), the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1979), the H. F. Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America (1990)-thereby becoming an honorary member, the Golden Badge Award of the European Geophysical Society (2001), and a doctorate honoris causa from the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg (2004). Leon was elected as a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge (1986). He first visited China in the 1970s, and returned often to collaborate with Chinese colleagues. He was named the first honorary professor of the Institute of Geophysics of the China Earthquake Administration (2004).
Leon served as the director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA for fourteen years, from 1972 to 1986. Among...