Stirling Colgate, a co-founder and past board member of the Santa Fe Institute, passed away December 1, 2013, at his home in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was 88.
Colgate was a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a past president and professor emeritus of physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He was America's premier diagnostician of thermonuclear weapons during the early years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Although much of his involvement with physics had been highly classified, he has made many contributions in the open literature including physics education and astrophysics.
Colgate was among a group of senior scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1980s whose vision for an independent, transdisciplinary scientific center grew into the Santa Fe Institute.
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