Page 52 - Jul2009

Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Charles H. Sherman, a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, died on 4 June 2009. Known to his friends as Charlie, his six-decade career as a promi- nent acoustician culminated with the publication in 2007 of Transducers and Arrays for Underwater Sound, considered by many as the authoritative text in the field.
Sherman was born in Fall River, Massachusetts on 16 December 1928. He majored in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a B.S. degree in 1950. Later, while employed at the Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory in New London Connecticut, he earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics at the University of Connecticut (1957 and 1962 respectively).
Charlie’s professional career as a
physicist began in 1950 at Tracerlab in Boston, where he worked on nuclear measurements. Three years later, his emphasis turned to underwater acoustics problems when he joined the U. S. Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory in New London, CT. There he made important, often ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of electroacoustic transduc- er behavior, correlation of noise fields, transducer array element interaction effects, relationships between acoustic fields of arrays and transducer cavitation limits, radiation impedances,
and efficiencies. After a decade at the Underwater Sound Laboratory, he joined Parke Mathematical Laboratories in Carlisle, Massachusetts, where he continued his interest and contributions to acoustics as well as nuclear and solid-state physics. He returned to the New London Navy Lab in 1970 (renamed by then as the Naval Underwater Systems Center) to work on turbulent-flow and flexural- wave noise reduction. After retiring from government civil service in 1988, he was employed “part time” at Image Acoustics, where he collaborat- ed with Jack Butler on acoustic trans- ducer and array problems. The text- book that they co-authored, an expansion of lecture notes for courses Charlie taught at the University of
Rhode Island and the University of Connecticut, was a labor of love to which he devoted more than five tireless years. It serves as a gift to acousticians worldwide.
To his colleagues, Charlie was a mentor, who taught by exemplary character—ever the gentleman, a hard worker, and always able to think clearly and logically about technical prob- lems. Along with his colleague, Ralph Woollett, he set stan- dards of excellence that are preserved in the legacy of his many written contributions to physics and engineering.
Charles H. Sherman
1928–2009
ASA has learned of the deaths of the following ASA Fellows:
Robert D. Collier Ivor D. Groves, Jr. Rhona Hellman Carleen M. Hutchins Gordon Raisbeck Stephen Wolf
Acoustics Today accepts contributions for “Passings.” Submissions of about 250 words that may be edited in MSWord or plain text files should be e-mailed to AcousticsToday@aip.org. Photographs may be informal, but must be at least 300 dpi. Please send the text and photographs in separate files.
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