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THE ROSSING PRIZE: THE FIRST 10 YEARS
Allan D. Pierce
Publications Office Acoustical Society of America West Barnstable, MA 02668
Introduction
The Rossing Prize in Acoustics Education was established in 2003 from a grant by Thomas D. Rossing to recognize an individual who has made significant contributions toward furthering acoustics education through distinguished teaching, cre- ation of educational materials, text- book writing and other activities.
At this point nine individuals have
been awarded the Rossing Prize and a
tenth will be awarded at the upcoming
meeting in San Francisco. Now that 10 years have passed, it seems appropriate that this magazine should bring out a summary of all the awards that have been given to date.
The Creator of the Award
It may be first appropriate to first say something about the creator of the award, Dr. Thomas Rossing. It was a very gener- ous grant and was motivated by Rossing’s strong belief that the Acoustical Society should do more to recognize contributions to acoustics education. Rossing himself is indisputably the ASA’s most prominent educator. Besides being very active in the Society for many years, he was also active in the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and served as its President in 1991. Over the years he wrote many articles regarding the teaching of physics, and especially acoustics, and published extensively in the American Journal of Physics, which is the flagship publication of the AAPT.
Dr. Rossing is the principal author, coauthor, or editor of more than 16 books. More than half of his 300 publications are directly related to teaching physics. His book, the The Science of Sound, now in its third edition (coauthored with Richard Moore and Paul Wheeler), is the definitive introduc- tory text on acoustics for liberal arts students. (The present writer owns two copies, a third was given out as a prize at a science fair.)
One of Rossings’s many honors was receiving the presti- gious Millikan Medal in 2001, named after the Nobel Prize winner, Robert Andrews Millikan, who coincidentally was the thesis advisor of ASA’s first president, Harvey Fletcher. The Millikan Medal is the AAPT’s highest award, given annually since 1963 to recognize notable and creative contri- butions to the teaching of physics. An inspiring encomium can be found in the American Journal of Physics, along with citations to five articles by Rossing in the Physics Teacher.
Rossing was the first person to be appointed as an Associate Editor for Education for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and served in that capacity for many years, and also for JASA-Express Letters. He received the
ASA’s Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics in 1992, and the ASA’s Distinguished Service Citation in 2006, and the Society’s Gold Medal in 2009. He is also the Editor of the Society’s newsletter, ECHOES. He began this job with the Summer 1997 issue; the most recent issue under his editorship is the Fall 2013 issue.
The Rossing Lectures
One of the conditions for receiving the prize is to give a plenary lecture at a meeting of the Acoustical Society on a topic of the prize recipient’s choice. There have been 9 such lectures so far, and they have generally been well attended and the audi- ence has found them stimulating. One can, of course, not summarize all of those lectures here, but the abstracts that appeared in the programs of the meetings, and which were written by the awardees, give an interesting overview of the many facets of acoustics education. Those abstracts are
reprinted below.
2004. Allan D. Pierce. Grappling with pithy problems: The education in acoustics of John William Strutt (aka Lord Rayleigh) and of the rest of us
There is a little of Rayleigh in each of us, so we might benefit from some selective emulation, and educators might adopt some of the stimulations that contributed to Rayleigh’s success. As a child, Rayleigh loved dabbling in scientific experimental projects, but his formal education was greatly
Tom Rossing and a student contemplating a demonstration experiment.
\\\[The Rossing Prize is awarded\\\] to recognize an individual who has made significant contributions toward furthering acoustics education.”
The Rossing Prize 31