Dear Colleagues: I also wanted to recognize the recent passing of Dick Marsh on January 3 at the age of 94.
https://www.caltech.edu/news/remembering-caltech-crystallographer-richard-marsh-53554 <https://www.caltech.edu/news/remembering-caltech-crystallographer-richard-marsh-53554> He wrote a memoir that is posted in the ACA archives http://www.amercrystalassn.org/h-Marsh <http://www.amercrystalassn.org/h-Marsh> Dick was a remarkable individual, always positive, helpful, kind, and exceptionally brilliant. It was a joy to have an office next to him for six years, and to have the opportunity to share hundreds of lunches and coffee breaks with him at Caltech. He was an integral part of that early structural group at Caltech when Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology research at the Gates and Crellin Laboratories included gas and single crystal diffraction, the beginnings in the understanding and use of quantum chemistry, and automated computing, with a group that included Linus Pauling, Verner Schomaker, Sten Samson, Bill Schaefer, Eddie Hughes, and countless others. http://www.iucr.org/gallery/1947/caltech His group developed one of the first integrated packages for structure refinement, CRYM, in the early 1960’s. Dick’s more recent claim to fame was his insight into reading an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society or Inorganic Chemistry that contained a crystallographic structure and recognizing an error in the choice of space group of “unnecessarily low symmetry.” He often saw patterns in the incorrect choices of space groups, and helped in the development of programs like PLATON, POINTLESS, ZANUDA, for the automated determination of space group. He was an avid tennis player and golfer, and lived close enough to Caltech to ride in on his bicycle almost every day until about a decade ago. He will be greatly missed. Bernie Santarsiero
