Alan Tower Waterman Jr. ’39

Alan died of pneumonia in Palo Alto, Calif., Jan. 9, 2008.

After Princeton, Alan studied meteorology at Cal Tech, and during World War II, he worked on a research team that enabled the propagation of radar beyond the horizon. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1952, he joined the Stanford electrical engineering faculty in 1954. He retired in 1983 as a member of the STARLAB group, though he continued teaching for several years. He edited the journal Radio Science through the 1980s.

An outdoorsman since his youth, having made long canoe trips in Maine and alone in the boundary waters of Minnesota, he could still handle a canoe at 89. An active member of the Rock Climbing Section of the Sierra Club, he climbed in all the major ranges in the Americas and Europe. He totaled his car in a rollover crash in Nevada on the way to join the Princeton alumni climb at Mount Princeton, and then was disappointed he did not summit the peak. He ran the Boston Marathon, among others, and set the world record for steeplechases in the over-55 group.

Alan’s wife, Lori, died in 2001. He is survived by two daughters, two sons, 12 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. With them we celebrate the life of this extraordinary man.