Floyd Ratliff, Professor Emeritus of Biophysics and Physiological
Psychology
at The Rockefeller University, passed away recently at the age of 80.
Ratliff's undergraduate education was at Colorado College. His graduate
training was at Brown under Lorrin Riggs. He was awarded a National Research
Council fellowship in 1950 to work with H. Keffer Hartline at Johns
Hopkins, and
then spent three years at Harvard, initially as an Instructor and then as
Assistant Professor in Psychology, where he worked with von Bekesy. Ratliff
rejoined Hartline at the Rockefeller University in 1954, where he continued to
work until he became Professor Emeritus in 1989.
His many awards include election to the National Academy of Sciences
(elected
1966), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Warren Medal of the
Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Tillyer Award of the Optical
Society
of America (1976), the Medal for Distinguished Service of Brown University,
the
Pisart Vision Award of the Lighthouse (1983), and the American Psychological
Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1984). He also
served
as president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Ratliff's work on the lateral eye of the horseshoe crab Limulus with Nobel
Laureate H. Keffer Hartline and other colleagues at The Rockefeller University
was the first quantitative description of information processing in a
portion of
the nervous system, and represented the first use of computerized data
collection in neurophysiology. Other major scientific interests included
visual
psychophysics, electroretinography, and visual evoked potentials. His many
colleagues and students included William H. Miller, D. Lange, Bruce W. Knight,
Jun-Ichi Toyoda, Norma Graham, Norman Milkman, Fred Dodge, Robert Barlow,
Henry
Lester, Robert DeVoe, Richard Chappell, Richard Purple, Charles Stevens,
Robert
M. Shapley, Harry Wms. Harper, Michael W. Levine, Lawrence Sirovich, Israel
Abramov, James Gordon, Max Snodderly, Alan Adolph, John Tuttle, Fulton Wong,
Ehud Kaplan, Shaul Hochstein, Vance Zemon, Jonathan Victor, Scott Brodie,
Keith
Purpura, Robert Soodak, Sergiu Marcus, R. Clay Reid, Stefan Dawis, and Daniel
Tranchina.
Ratliff was deeply interested in the relationship of art and science, and
especially the extent to which the intuitions of great artists anticipated
many
of the conceptual advances in the neuroscience and psychology of vision. This
theme was brilliantly developed in his two major books, "Mach Bands" (1965,
Holden Day) and "Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism" (1992, The
Rockefeller University Press).
He is survived by his wife Orma, his sister Edith Johnson, his daughter
Merry, and a grandson. His many colleagues and trainees will long remember
him
not only for his deep intellectual insights, but also his gentle guidance and
humble humanity.
Jonathan D. Victor jdvicto@med.cornell.edu
Department of Neurology and Neuroscience (212) 746 2343 (office)
Weill Medical College of Cornell University (212) 746 6521 (lab)
1300 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021 (212) 746 8984 (fax)
personal: www-users.med.cornell.edu/~jdvicto/jdvonweb.html
lab : www-users.med.cornell.edu/~jdvicto/labonweb.html