Thoughts on Receiving the Bruce Medal

Mercury, November/December 2005 Table of Contents

Courtesy of UC/Lick Observatory.

by Robert P. Kraft

As you just learned from Sidney Wolff’s very generous introduction, I’ve received some honors in the past, but none are so dear to me as the Bruce Medal, in part because I’ve been a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific since I was nineteen years old, joining in 1946 some 59 years ago, and in part because I’ve been put on a list that contains many of my astronomical heroes: great stellar spectroscopists such as Otto Struve, who could discourse with authority on every astronomical topic known in the 1930s and 40s and who wrote some 400 papers; Jesse Greenstein, who founded the Caltech astronomy department, who also wrote some 400 papers, and who was the prime mover on the observational side in the study of the chemical evolution of the Universe; and George Herbig, who pioneered the study of star formation in the 1950s and 60s, from whom I had the benefit of sage advice when he took me on as a Ph.D. thesis student at Lick Observatory in 1953. I profited from their example on the personal as well as research level and have to say I am still amazed to be on a list with them.

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