Robert S. Woodward

Brilliant investigations in astronomy, geodesy, and physics won Robert Simpson Woodward early eminence in the government’s scientific service, where his active work covered twenty-one years in highly technical surveys. His subsequent twelve years on the Columbia faculty and his deanship of the School of Pure Science at Columbia University made evident his unusual administrative ability and intuitive understanding of student problems. During the last fifteen years he was responsible, as president of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, for elaborate programs of research, extending from nutrition laboratories in Boston to desert stations in Arizona, and from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California to the non-magnetic yacht which sailed three hundred thousand miles correcting the mariner’s compass. These, and many similar projects, were selected with a discrimination and established with a solidity notable in the history of science. His friends in the Century, and they were many, will remember that not even these highly technical occupations could obscure the quick sympathy, twinkling humor and peculiar charm which marked his conversation.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1925 Century Association Yearbook