(336b) Berkeley in the Early 60’s

First of all I was a maverick; I had done two degrees at MIT, and everyone who was able to do so remained there for their PhD.  My advisor and department head, Ed Gilliland told me I was crazy to leave MIT and that Berkeley was “no good.”  But Tom Sherwood told me about a hot young faculty member there -- John Prausnitz.  I had no intention of doing thermodynamics, but his energy, enthusiasm, and creativity seduced me.  Thermodynamics was dull rote stuff that would get properties from other properties.  But Molecular Thermodynamics could get something from nothing, using “enlightened empiricism.” 

Really what appealed to me most is that it seemed that every day John came into the lab with five new ideas.  He was so prolific that we, his students, formulated a defense, and that was to have more new ideas.  I don’t believe that at the time we realized that that was his plan all along, but it worked and we opened lots of new doors.  Another technique he used was to put his students into competition with each other.  He would tell me that another student was really doing better than I was, so I had better work harder.   Eventually I compared notes with the other student, who said he was being told that I was surpassing him.  So we knew what was going on, but it it elevated us both.

John’s great skill was motivating students and colleagues to achieve important results.  For example, he was the antithesis of an experimentalist, but he knew what experiments could do, and he knew to whom to send us to work out the details.   For example, we were using IR at the time, ages before the advent of Fourier transform.  There was no quantitative chromatograph commercially available, so we built one and used it successfully.

Another case was computers.  Fortran had just come out and it seemed that a whole class of new problems had become tractable.  But John would not even look at computer output – we had to make graphs.  The department head, Don Hanson, came up with a plot to get John computer-active, and outlined the possibility of setting up computer programs for calculating separations.  Several of us worked on it, and the upshot was that we came up with what was really the first monograph on applications to separations, full of computer programs.  John coauthored the book and made very substantial contributions to the text, but still never looked at the output. 

One of the outstanding applications of computers was the opportunity to use novel excess Gibbs energy expressions based on entropy more than enthalpy.  These really quite inaccessible with slide rules, but facile with Fortran.  At one point George Scatchard from MIT came to Berkeley and gave a talk of such an equation, developed with his student Wilson.  It had not yet been published (and would not be published until some years later), but John’s students copied the form and started using it.  Soon they had demonstrated clearly its superiority to the enthalpic VLE models such as Margules and van Laar, and they published the results (with attribution) before Wilson actually published what we now know as Wilson’s Equation.  This led to improved entropic equations still used, such as NRTL and UNIQUAC, but still without John becoming computer-active.

John did always want to learn.  I remember when he decided to learn statistical mechanics.  He assigned three of his students to go learn about it and teach him.  One took the course in Chemistry, one in Physics, and I took the Mechanical Engineering course from the youngest (and youngest-looking) professor at Berkeley, Prof Tien.  He was a wonderful teacher, and later became the first nonwhite Chancellor of Berkeley.  But then I digress; the three of us started a class for John and the rest of the group, and he went on to use the results most powerfully.

One of the most striking things I learned about John early on was his ability to communicate to a group.  Other seminar speakers would inundate the audience in equations attempting to be paragons of elegance.  John was different – I always emerged from his presentations saying “My goodness that was easy.  I wish I had thought of that.”  He did not try to appear elegant; rather he solved important problems simply.

I went to Berkeley thinking I might want to be a university professor, and by his example and guidance, John intensified that attitude.  He has stayed in touch with me, and with his other academic progeny, for now nearly half a century, always challenging and elevating us.