About Professor Emeritus Albert A. Bartlett
Professor Emeritus Al Bartlett (Colorado University at Boulder) received a BA degree from Colgate University and MA and PhD degrees in Nuclear Physics from Harvard University in 1948 and 1951, respectively. He has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado since 1950. He was President of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1978. In 1981 he received the Association's Robert A. Millikan Award for his outstanding scholarly contributions to physics education.
In 2008, Prof. Al Bartlett was one of the winners of the The Population Institute 2008 Global Media Award.
Watch Prof. Bartlett's short acceptance speech.
Beginning in 1944, Al Bartlett worked for 25 months in Los Alamos. Here is more information about Al Bartlett at Los Alamos, with photos. The Fall, 1995 interview of Al Bartlett by Paul Nachman covers Al's earlier years.
Dr. Albert A. Bartlett joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in Boulder as a Professor of Physics in September, 1950. In 1969 and 1970 he served two terms as the elected Chair of the Faculty Council of all four campuses of the University of Colorado. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2001 Dr. Bartlett testified before the US Congress on energy policy. He was awarded one of the first annual M. King Hubbert Awards at the ASPO USA Denver World Oil Conference in the Fall of 2005.
Dr. Bartlett has given his celebrated lecture, Arithmetic, Population and Energy over 1,600 times since September 1969 (average of once every 8.5 days).
Reprints of Prof. Bartlett's papers have been published by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in the book, "The Essential Exponential! For the Future of Our Planet." The book was complied by University of Nebraska physicists and features articles from Bartlett and other scholars on the topic of exponential human population growth and the increasing rate of natural resource consumption, which can not continue unabated.
In the late 1950s Professor Bartlett was an initiator of a citizens' effort to preserve open space in Boulder, Colorado, which ultimately led to the formation of The City of Boulder's Open Space Program. By 1999, the Program has purchased over 26,000 acres of land for preservation as public open space. Professor Bartlett is a founding member of PLAN-Boulder County, a City and County environmental group.
Few people have contributed as much over the years to physics education as Professor Albert Bartlett. Teachers have regularly used snippets from his "et cetera..." column in The Physics Teacher. His paper "Physics from the News: Curve Fitting" in the May issue of The Physics Teacher deserves careful reading. In this article, Professor Bartlett carefully analyzes the Transportation Department estimate that a single 40,000-kg truck does as much damage to an interstate highway as 9,600 cars in order to illustrate how "real world" physics problems can be incorporated into our physics teaching. The paper "Graphical representations of Fraunhofer interference and diffraction", by Bartlett and Bruce Mechtly, American Journal of Physics 62, 501-510 (1994), is also highly recommended.
Interviews
See the interviews section for various interviews of Al Bartlett, including the comprehensive Fall, 1995 interview of Al Bartlett by Paul Nachman.
Additional biographical references on Albert A. Bartlett
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