Harry Soodak

Soodak was born in New York City. Married to Martha for 55 years, they had three children Deborah, Robert, and Lenore.[1]

Soodak received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York (CCNY) in February 1940, a master's degree from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1944.[2]

Soodak worked on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he gave courses on nuclear physics and reactor theory. According to Oak Ridge Director Alvin M. Weinberg, these courses were "phenomenally successful" and Soodak had the reputation in the United States Atomic Energy Commission of being "one of the clearest lecturers in the business.”[2] In 1945, Harry and Eugene Wigner published the first design of a sodium-cooled breeder reactor.[2] Following work at the Manhattan Project, he served as a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for nearly three years. In 1949, Soodak joined the physics department of his alma mater, City College of New York. He retired in 1992.[2]

Soodak signed the July 13, 1945 addendum to the Szilard petition that asked that the Japanese be given the opportunity to surrender before bombing them.[3] Commenting on Soodak's early work, as well as his continuing contributions to nuclear physics after coming to CCNY – which included lecturing on nuclear theory in the graduate schools of NYU and of Columbia – Mark W. Zemansky, who was then chairman of the physics department at CCNY, wrote in 1958: "During the war, Dr. Soodak made a name for himself in the field of reactor design. Through his theoretical work, in books and articles, and his practical applications, he has become a leading international authority on the design of nuclear reactors. There is hardly a handbook or treatise to which he has not contributed or served in an editorial capacity."[2] Without doubt Harry Soodak's greatest legacy is the decisive influence he had on the hundreds of undergraduate students he taught and advised at CCNY.[2]

In the 1970s, Soodak began working with Arthur Iberall in an area of complex systems. They were observing an area that physics has neglected, that of complex systems with their very long internal factory day delays.[4][5][6][7] These systems are associated with nested hierarchy and with an extensive range of time scale processes. It was such connections, referred to as both up-down or in-out connections (as nested hierarchy) and side-side or flatland physics among atomistic-like components (as heterarchy) that became the hallmark of homeokinetic problems. By 1975, they began to describe homeokinetics, the physics of complex, self-organizing systems, as dealing with the problems of nature, life, humankind, mind, and society.[8]

The Harry Soodak Memorial Scholarship at the CCNY Physics Department was created in his honor.[9]

• Fast neutron reactor, (1961).[10]

Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, 1962.[11]

Outstanding Teacher Award, CCNY, 1987.[11]

• www.homeokinetics.org
• commons.trincoll.edu/homeokinetics
• www.trincoll.edu/depts/ecopsyc/homeokinetics