About Michael and this site

Michael W. Friedlander (1928-2021) was a professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly 60 years. In addition to his cosmic rays research, he had many other interests, both within the physics department and across the larger university community. He also passionately believed in public outreach, explaining science to a wider audience. This web site is a tribute to the breadth and depth and sheer number of years of commitment he demonstrated throughout his career. It also includes glimpses into his family life and hobbies.

This web site was designed, written, and coded by his son, David Friedlander. The site’s release, on April 29, 2022, was planned to coincide with the first anniversary of his death in 2021. While the site was created after his passing, I (David) had mentioned to him over many years my desire to create such a site for him (originally to be his faculty “page” on the WU Physics web site). (Indeed the overarching structure of the site is quite similar to notes of mine I found from circa 2002.) More recently, he knew that I was working to assemble a complete bibliography of his papers (scientific papers, articles, and book reviews, all found on this site). In his modesty, he had demurred over my creating it, but I hope this will be another form of his legacy.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge and thank my mother Jessica, my wife Sheryl, and my sister Rachel for their comments and suggestions about content and design.

I hope you enjoy browsing and reading as much as I did putting it together.

David Friedlander
29 April 2022

 

Technical credits

This web site is based on a responsive web design (adjusts to size differences of computers, tablets, and smartphones) ("Verti") from HTML5 UP. To handle proper embedding of PDF (Portable Document Format) files, I used the JavaScript PDFObject utility, so that all PDFs are seen in the browser (not downloaded to your device). Site content was created with the Vim editor and managed with Transmit (file transfer and editing application). There are many images on this site, which required a lot of different tools, including:

More credits:
PDF documents were managed by Adobe Acrobat Pro. The bibliography was done in BibDesk (part of TeXLive/MacTeX) and exported via “bibtex2html”. Other back-end programming was done in python. The package manager MacPorts was used to build several of these tools, including vim, bibtex2html, TeXLive, ImageMagick, and python.