M. Gordon Wolman

Markley Gordon "Reds" Wolman (born August 16, 1924 in Baltimore ; † February 24, 2010 ibid) was an American geologist and geographer ( geomorphology ) and an expert on river systems.

Wolman was the son of Abel Wolman and studied at Haverford College and, interrupted by military service in World War II, at Johns Hopkins University with a degree in geography in 1949. He received his doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1953 (with a dissertation on the Brandwyne Creek in Pennsylvania) and then was on the US Geological Survey . From 1958 he taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he headed the Faculty of Geography and Environmental Engineering he had created for 20 years until his retirement in 1990.

His book with Luna Leopold and John P. Miller (Harvard) on geological processes in rivers was a standard work that created a quantitative basis for geomorphological processes in rivers (using methods such as the Wolman pebble count for assessing river sediments).

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Engineering, and was President of the Geological Society of America . In 1999 he received the Penrose Medal and in 1989 the Cullum Geographical Medal of the American Geographical Society . In 2006 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science with Luna Leopold .

Fonts

• with Luna Leopold, John Miller: Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, San Francisco: Freeman 1964, Reprint Dover 1995

literature

• Ruth Defries, Thomas Dunne, Biographical Memoirs Fellows National Academy, pdf

Web links

• Obituary at Johns Hopkins University
• The Wolmans: Luminaries of the JHU Global Water Program, Johns Hopkins University 2010
• Emma Brown, Washington Post obituary, March 2, 2010