Physicist Sidney Richard Coleman died 18 November 2007 of Parkinson’s Disease. Aged 70, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University for more than 40 years. According to The Chicago Tribune, “Students flocked to Mr. Coleman’s courses because the professor made dense ideas understandable. ‘He was good at explaining complex, difficult ideas and making them seem simple. He was very popular with students on that account,’ said Arthur Jaffe, a mathematics and theoretical science professor at Harvard. ‘I personally heard him give lectures. They were always quite brilliant.'”
The Tribune also noted his “passion for science fiction. He attended numerous science fiction conventions and frequently penned book reviews for magazines. He served as a consultant for several top science fiction authors whom he befriended, and appeared as a character in a handful of sci-fi stories too.” Many of those reviews appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the 1970s.
Locus says Coleman was “a co-founder in the 1950s of Advent:Publishers, a publishing house founded by members of the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club to publish criticism, history, and bibliography of the science fiction field.
Coleman is survived by his wife, Diana, who he met at Harvard, his brother Robert, and several cousins.