APS elects David Raup, Jerome Friedman

The American Philosophical Society has recently elected to its membership David Raup, the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences, the Committees on Evolutionary Biology and Conceptual Foundations of Science and the College, and alumnus Jerome Friedman (A.B., ’50; S.M., ’53; Ph.D., ’56), who worked under Enrico Fermi while attending Chicago and who went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990.

Members of the society are organized into five classes: mathematical and physical sciences; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities; and the arts, learned professions and public affairs. Raup was selected to serve in its biological sciences class, and Friedman, who currently is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will serve in its mathematical and physical sciences class.

Raup is a would-renowned paleontologist and an authority on evolution and mass extinctions. He has studied the long-term patterns of life on earth and how impacts from extraterrestrial bodies such as comets or asteroids may have caused mass extinctions. He is the author of several books, including The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science (1986) and Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (1991).

Friedman shared the 1990 Nobel Prize with Richard Taylor and Henry Kendall for a series of experiments that showed that fundamental particles of matter are not protons and neutrons, but smaller particles known as quarks. This evidence allowed scientists to develop the Standard Model theory of matter, which states that all matter is made up of combinations of six quarks and six leptons that interact with three types of force particles.