The March-April 2013 issue of the Ohio State Alumni Magazine featured Bob Mills, Professor of Physics.  An earlier issue of of the magazine had asked former students to write in about their memories of their favortie teachers.  Text from the magazine and the letter from former student Evelyn Kinzel follows.  Bob Mills joined OSU in 1956 and retired in 1995.  He was a well-loved colleague who is remembered fondly by those who shared time with him in the department prior to his death in 1999.

FROM MARCH-APRIL 2013 -Ohio State Alumni Magazine -

Page 4 - On the cover

Physics professor Robert L. Mills had already made a name for himself by the time he arrived at Ohio State in 1956.  Three years earlier, as a research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and future Nobel Prize winner Chen Ning Yang had put forth the landmark Yang-Mills theory.

The theorgy was "as basic a contribution to science as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity," said an article published in 1995 in The Scientist. [It is] considered to be the foundation of current understanding of how subatomic particles interact."

Mills retired from the university in 1995 after a distinguished career, and his death in 1999 was noted with an obituary in the New York Times. An announcemtn from the Department of Physics at the time described him as "a gentleman of unfailing good humor and sincere and active concern for helping others."

Page 10

One of my favorite teachers was Robert Mills of the Department of Physics.

One day in quantum mechanics class, we were getting a mindful of particularly abstruse material on Hilbert spaces.  My recollection is that , as used in our class, a Hilbert space is an extension of three-dimensional space  to include, for example, the momenta of many particles.

A student sitting behind me blurted, "Is this stuff real?" Professor Mills smiled and answered, "I don't know if there's a Hilbert space in heaven."

The use of heaven as ultimate reality makes me smile and illustrates another of Proessor Mills's many dimensions.  He used to visit the elderly and distinguished professor Alpheus Smith, former chair of the  physics department, and read to him.         
                                                                         Evelyn Kinzel '69, '69 MS (LM)
                                                                         Columbus, OH

If you are an alumnus of OSU Department of Physics and reading about Professor Mills jogs your memory about him or other professors, please feel free to submit your stories to Ohio State Alumni Magazine,  2200 Olentangy River Road, Columbus, OH  43210 or to bonenberger@ohiostatealumni.org.  If you make a submission, please also copy Shelley Palmer at palmer.14@osu.edu and we may share your stories on our webpage in the future.