Thomas Howard Stix was an American physicist. Stix performed seminal work in plasma physics, and wrote the first mathematical treatment of the field in 1962's The Theory of Plasma Waves.
History
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 12, 1924, Stix grew up near Washington University. The Stix family owned Rice-Stix Inc., a dry goods firm that was among the city's largest businesses at the turn of the 20th century. It continued operations until the 1950s. His family home on Forsyth Boulevard was eventually donated to Washington University and is now the StixInternational House. Stix graduated from John Burroughs School and served in the U.S. Army as a radio expert in the Pacific theater during and after World War II. After the war, he obtained his bachelor's degree from Caltech in 1948 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1953. He worked for Project Matterhorn, a secret U.S. study of nuclear fusion, and developed the Stix coil to contain gases that were heated to solar temperatures with electromagnetic waves. Stix's invention of the coil jump-started a period of intellectual productivity that revolutionized plasma heating research and whose influence is still felt in the field. Stix's 1975 paper “Fast Wave Heating of a Two-Component Plasma” remains one of the most cited papers ever published by the journal Nuclear Fusion. Stix taught astrophysics at Princeton, and did much of his research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 1978, Stix was appointed Associate Director for Academic Affairs at PPPL. He pioneered and for many years served as director of Princeton's Program in Plasma Physics, the first graduate-level program of its kind. In 1991, Princeton awarded its inaugural "University Award for Distinguished Teaching” to Stix for his contributions as a teacher and educator.
Stix's 1962 book, The Theory of Plasma Waves, was translated into several foreign languages including Japanese and Russian. It received a paperback reprint in 2012 and still sells and is taught at universities around the world. Stix and his wife, Hazel Sherwin, were married for 51 years and together had two children, Susan Stix Fisher of New York City and Dr. Michael Sherwin Stix of Lexington, Massachusetts. Upon his death on April 16, 2001, of leukemia, Stix and his wife had been longtime residents of Princeton. His obituary in the New York Times noted that Stix's "elegant mastery of the literally infinite complexities of waves in electrified gases helped create a new field of science." The American Physical Society created the Thomas H. Stix Award in Stix's honor in 2013. The award is presented annually to a plasma physics researcher with outstanding contributions early in their career.
