David Ritson

David was my lovely neighbor on Santa Ynez st at Stanford. We had good chats at neighborhood parties and
during walks. I'm sorry I only found out about his passing today. I would certainly have attended his memorial service. So good it was at the family home with his loving family. He will be joining his dear Italian wife.

We had the privilege of working with David in the MAC experiment at SLAC, and subsequently becoming friends of the Ritson family.
David was an exceptional physicist: he was always ahead of everybody else in grasping the issues, and always original in finding solutions. During our career, we had the chance to work with several Nobel laureates and other prominent figures in Particle Physics; David was the only one with whom we often found ourselves dreading that he would immediately notice...

I was a PhD student on the MAC experiment in the early 1980's. Although I was from a different university and we didn't work directly together, Dave wrote me a very nice letter of recommendation that I am sure helped me get my first job and my career off to a great start. Dave is one of my absolute physics heros: He was a nice, mild-mannered man, a great particle physicist, I known he made some key contributions to at least 2 accelerators, and he wrote the most amazing beautiful FORTRAN code...