David Rowe 1936 – 2020

I learnt from a tweet today from one of his past post-docs that David Rowe died yesterday.  David was a theoretician who worked mainly on nuclear physics, famous for, amongst other things, his application of group theoretical methods in the latter part of his career and on the equations of motion approach to many-body physics earlier on.  I very much enjoyed his first book, covering many-body physics in general and covering in detail the equations of motion approach, and when it came to leaving my office for the last day before lock-down,  I decided that the one book I would fit into my bag would be his book Fundamentals of Nuclear Models, co-written with John Wood. 

David was British-Canadian, with dual nationality, following moving to Canada after study at Cambridge and Oxford, and a research position at the UKAEA with Tony Lane.  He spent the bulk of his career at the University of Toronto and though he retired in 1998, his interest and activities in nuclear theory did not wane.  Indeed, he published a paper in this month's edition of Physical Review C (on a quantized algebraic version of the Bohr-Mottelson Unified Model)