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 1916 - 1991 (75 years)
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| Name |
Yale Mintz |
| Born |
30 Mar 1916 |
Manhattan, New York, New York, USA  |
| Gender |
Male |
| Died |
27 May 1991 |
Jerusalem, Israel |
| Obituary |
1993 |
University of California: In Memoriam, 1993
Yale Mintz, Atmospheric Sciences: Los Angeles
1916-1991
Professor Emeritus
Yale Mintz, professor emeritus at UCLA, passed away in Jerusalem, Israel, on April 27, 1991, following several months of a brave fight against cancer.
He was among the pioneers who laid the foundation for the present-day numerical models of the general circulation of the atmosphere. Currently, these models are being used all over the world for weather and climate predictions, as well as for scientific studies focusing on the global atmosphere. He was one of the five recipients of the 1967 Meisinger Award of the American Meteorological Society ?for their outstanding individual and collective contributions to dynamic meteorology through their pioneering efforts to numerically model the dynamic behavior of the atmosphere by utilizing directly the primitive equations of motion.? In 1990 he received the Rossby Research Medal, the highest award of the American Meteorological Society, ?for preeminent leadership in the global modeling of climate, and for inspiring tutelage of several generation of scientists.?
Yale Mintz received his B.A. in general humanistic studies from Dartmouth College in 1937 and his M.S. in geology from Columbia University in 1942. Subsequently he joined UCLA as a graduate student in the Department of Meterology and received his Ph.D. in 1949, being the second recipient of this degree from the department. In 1950, he joined the faculty of the department.
Yale Mintz's involvement with the general circulation of the atmosphere, which was to become the major theme of his scientific enterprise, began with his Ph.D. thesis; his mentor was the famous Jacob Bjerknes, the founder and the first chairman of the department. Mintz's early work was concerned with the eddy angular momentum transport and the maintenance of zonal flow in the atmosphere as well as the preparation of a climatological atlas in collaboration with Gordon Dean, all of which were to become standard textbook material. In the early 1950s, he was the co-principal investigator (with J. Bjerknes) of the UCLA General Circulation Project. Some of us still remember the heroic efforts of Mintz in the earlier phase of this project during which he orchestrated an army of student helpers and amateur programmers to feed a prodigious amount of data through paper tape to SWAC, the earliest computer on campus, now languishing in the basement of the Engineering Building.
After the completion of the General Circulation Project, Mintz was inspired by the work of the Princeton group to start the numerical simulation experiments on the global circulation. Initially his senior departmental colleagues felt that it was far too ambitious a project for a single faculty member to undertake. But he was convinced that numerical modeling was essential for understanding the global atmosphere, and he continued to follow that line of thinking with amazing energy and passion until the end of his life.
Akio Arakawa from Japan joined him in this ambitious research endeavor, initially as a visiting scientist from 1961 to 1963 and then as a regular faculty member starting from 1965. This collaboration resulted in the development of the first UCLA General Circulation Model, which later became known as the Mintz-Arakawa Model. The model was a global one based on the primitive equations with realistic land-sea distributions and surface topography, the first of that kind ever developed. Mintz pioneered several interesting applications of the model, of which his work on the general circulation of Mars with Conway Leovy and on the three-dimensional ozone transport problem with Michael Schlesinger merit special mention. He was also extremely keen in developing an ambitious project involving a coupled ocean-atmosphere model at UCLA as early as in the late 1960s.
Mintz belonged to that vanished breed of scientists who cultivated scholarship for its own sake and wished to be regarded as a naturalist. He was a perfectionist who brought, to every piece of research that he did, a well-developed sense of aesthetics. He did most of his work in collaboration with others and he always brought a passionate dedication and an infectious sense of enthusiasm to his team. He never hesitated to make his scientific opinions known to his peers vocally. He struggled for clarity in his scientific writings, and his high standards kept the number of his publications to a modest list.
Yale Mintz was an active and prominent member of the department, being chairman between the years 1967 and 1969. In 1977, he retired from UCLA to join the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, where he continued his research as a consulting scientist with the main thrust on understanding the influence of land and ocean surface processes on the distribution of precipitation. Even after retirement, he made it a point to visit the department periodically and be apprised by his colleagues of their most recent activities.
Yale Mintz was religious by temperament, liberal and international in outlook, and an academic by choice. He and his cultured and talented wife, Ruth Mintz, were an extremely friendly couple and their thoughtful hospitality, especially to the new members of the department, will be remembered with gratitude. |
| Agency: University of California |
Address:
http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0h4n99rb&chunk.id=div00049&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text |
| Person ID |
I1235 |
Palevsky | Yehudah |
| Last Modified |
5 Mar 2021 |
| Family |
Ruth Finer, b. 25 Nov 1919, d. 24 Mar 1998, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, California, USA (Age 78 years) |
| Children |
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| Last Modified |
5 Nov 2013 |
| Family ID |
F450 |
Group Sheet | Family Chart |
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