A Million Books

Francis W. Sears, Appleton Professor of Physics and department chairman, was guest of honor at a reception and ceremony at the Hotel New Yorker, New York City, on February 2, when the Addison-Wesley Publishing Company celebrated the sale of the one-millionth copy of a book by Professor Sears. Dartmouth's distinguished physicist is the author or co-author of several college textbooks now in use throughout the world.

Guests of honor with Professor Sears were his co-authors: Prof. Mark Zeman-sky of C.C.N.Y., Profs. M. R. Wehr and James A. Richards Jr. of Drexel Institute of Technology, and John F. Lee, president of the State University of New York, Long Island Center, at Oyster Bay.

When a record sells a million copies the singer is usually presented with a gold record. In Professor Sears' case, the publisher had prepared for him a specially bound set of the books he has written, and the presentation was made by Dr. Leonard O. Olsen of Monterey, Calif., president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Many colleagues from the world of physics were among those at the reception.

Professor Sears' association with Addison-Wesley began in 1942 when the firm published a paperbound edition of Mechanics, designed primarily for classes at Lowell Institute. This was combined with two other paperbound books in 1944 to make the clothbound volume, Mechanics, Heat, and Sound, the current and revised edition of which came out in 1950. This was known as Volume I of the Principles of Physics series. Professor Sears' Electricity and Magnetism became Volume II and Optics became Volume III. An abridgement of these three books came out as College Physics by Sears and Zemansky, now in its third edition. This volume became the basis for UniversityPhysics (1949) which has enjoyed the greatest sale of any of Professor Sears' books and is today the most widely used "engineering physics" text in the country.

Professor Sears wrote Thermodynamics, the Kinetic Theory of Gases, andStatistical Mechanics in 1950, and this led to Thermodynamics by Lee and Sears in 1955. In 1958 there appeared Mechanics, Wave Motion and Heat, a more modern version of the 1944 book, and last year Professor Sears was one of the authors of Modern University Physics with Richards, Wehr and Zemansky.

It is estimated that more than a thousand colleges and universities throughout the world have used Professor Sears' books, either in English or translation, and consequently he has exerted a profound influence on the teaching of introductory physics. Professor Sears is past president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of numerous other scientific societies. After teaching physics at M.I.T. for over thirty years, he joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1955 and was elected Applet on Professor last year.

Prof. Francis W. Sears