John Taylor received his B.A. in math from Cambridge University
in 1960 and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Berkeley in 1963. He
is professor emeritus of physics and Presidential Teaching Scholar at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of some 40 articles in
research journals; a book, Classical Mechanics; and three other textbooks,
one of which, An Introduction to Error Analysis, has been translated
into eleven foreign languages. He received a Distinguished Service
Citation from the American Association of Physics Teachers and was
named Colorado Professor of the Year in 1989. His television series Physics
for Fun won an Emmy Award in 1990. He retired in 2005 and now
lives in Washington, D.C.
Professor Chris Zafiratos received his B.S. from Lewis &
Clark College in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington
in 1962. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National laboratory
and faculty member at Oregon State University before coming to
the University of Colorado in 1967. His principal research was in nuclear
physics, and he was author of over fifty articles and books. He received
the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College, as well as
numerous other citations for contributions to his field. He was a fellow of
the American Physical Society and served in several academic administrative
positions during his tenure at the University of Colorado. He was
also vice president emeritus for the University of Colorado System, which
includes four campuses, as well as professor emeritus of physics. Chris
died in August in the year 2004.
Michael Dubson is a Senior Instructor in the Physics Department
at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is Associate Chair for
Undergraduate Studies and a member of the Physics Education Research
group. He received his B.S. from the University of Illinois (class of 1978)
and his Ph.D. from Cornell University (1984). For ten years, he worked
as a condensed matter experimentalist, doing research at Ohio State and
Michigan State Universities, and winning an NSF Presidential Young Investigator
Award. In 1995, he switched careers and joined the faculty at
Boulder, where he has worked on innovative teaching methods and undergraduate
curriculum development. He is the winner of several teaching
awards, including the 2006 American Association of Physics Teachers
Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. He is also a software
developer for PhET (http://phet.colorado.edu), a suite of free, interactive
simulations for learning science. His (non-physics) interests include amateur
astronomy, French literature, and biking with his wife Gisele.
