Page 43 - Spring 2010

Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Gideon Maidanik
1925–2010
Gideon Maidanik passed away on 18 January 2010 in his sleep while vis- iting friends in Philadelphia.
Gideon’s physics, like his person-
ality, was complex, insightful and
world class. He was one of the princi-
pal authors of Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA), one of the most important of the relatively few tools
for the analysis of vibration of com-
plex systems at high frequencies. He
made lasting contributions in a num-
ber of other fields, mostly related to problems of Navy interest. These
include the excitation of panels by tur-
bulent fields, radiation efficiency of
ribbed panels, compliant coatings to
reduce reflected and/or radiated
sound, sonar arrays, and the analysis
of complex systems. On the evening
before he died, he was working on reducing the noise radiated by ship’s propellers.
Not bad for a child who was classified as a “slow learner.” He earned that label because he was dyslectic, and thereby invited out of every agricultural school in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and is now Israel. Gideon was born there, near Safad in the upper Galilee, on 3 July 1925.
In 1946, Gideon left for England to train to become a pilot. However, his flight training caught the attention of the Israeli Air Force, which informed him that he was inducted into that organization. Gideon went on to get a commercial pilot’s license and returned to Israel. In 1950, he left again for England—this time for academics. He entered Manchester University to study engineering but quickly switched to physics. He finished a B.Sc., with honors, in 1954 and a M.Sc. the following year. His thesis was “Proton-proton scattering and charge independence of nuclear forces.”
Gideon was enticed to Brown University and started work- ing in acoustics under the stewardship of Peter Westervelt. His Ph.D. thesis was “Acoustic radiation pressure” and he received his degree in 1958. Gideon then returned to England for administrative reasons for a short time and returned to the U.S.
in 1960, where he joined the staff of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). It was at BBN that Gideon worked with Richard Lyon and Preston Smith to develop SEA. In 1966, at the invitation of Alan Powell, Gideon joined the David Taylor Naval Ship Research and Development Center (DTNSRDC), where he put much of his knowledge of energy methods, structural acoustics and vibration to practical use. He gave a series of seminars at DTNSRDC and was a visiting professor at several uni- versities. He was considered a preemi- nent teacher and proponent of wave- vector analytic techniques.
Since the early 1970s, Gideon’s research concentrated on acoustics as it relates to the acoustic signatures gener- ated by ships. His research has focused on basic principles such as the scatter-
ing mechanism of isolated or connected ribs on sonar domes, the quieting of ships internal machinery and the analysis of complex systems. The results that he obtained have not only advanced the state of the art in ship acoustics research, but have also demonstrated a rare ability to transform laboratory technologies into useful design tools. As a consequence, he led the way in devising means for mitigating the deleterious effects of fluid flow over a sonar dome. During this same period he also developed a thorough understanding of how compliant coatings influence the sound field radiated by fluid-loaded ribbed-structures.
As the author of well over one hundred publications, most- ly in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and the Journal of Sound and Vibration, Gideon also made many mem- orable oral presentations at meetings around the world. Although much of his research was necessarily directed at problems of Navy interest, one of the enduring things about Gideon’s work was its generality and applicability to broader problems, which gives it a measure of timelessness. His work was always good physics—useful to many people for a long time.
Joe Dickey
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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