Paul Leighton Donoho

Paul Leighton
Donoho passed away in Santa Rosa, California, on Sunday, June 10, 2012, after a seven-year battle with prostate cancer. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, September 7, 1931, to David Hubert Leigh Donoho and Aletria Martelle Donoho (née Hicks), he grew up in Houston, Texas. He is survived by his younger sister Deirdre "Dee" Donoho Price, his three children David Leigh Donoho, Andrew Ward Donoho, and Julia Anne Donoho, and his two grandchildren Daniel Aharon Donoho and Jessica Linn Donoho. Paul was married twice: to Julia Arlene Haas during 1956-1979 and to Merrily Pilot from 1982-2005.
Paul came of age during Physics' amazing post World War II growth spurt. He attended Lamar High School, graduated with Honors in Physics from the Rice Institute in 1952, and received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1958. Paul's honors included election to Phi Beta Kappa and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. Paul's Ph.D. thesis studied the "Photoproduction of Positive K Mesons in Hydrogen"; two of Caltech's future Nobel physicists (Feynman and Gell-Mann) served on the thesis committee.
After his Ph.D., Paul moved to Bell Labs in New Jersey, where the semiconductor had been invented several years before. He switched fields to solid state physics and soon found a faculty position at Rice University in Houston, Texas. At Rice he rose to Professor of Physics, working in condensed matter physics and low temperature physics. Simultaneously, Paul pushed the digital revolution then starting in oil exploration (based in Houston); he developed digital seismometers by 1962, and co-founded the company Alpine Geophysical in the mid 1960's with his father David (an expert in oilfield machine-tools); Alpine supplied marine seismic exploration sensors and systems.
In the mid-1970's, Paul began work at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Galveston, eventually becoming Director, where he built ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS's), that could be used for exploration, surveillance, or earthquake detection. Paul later joined Chevron's La Habra Research Facility and continued OBS work while also working on Chevron's oil exploration projects in California and Angola. Paul developed new data compression standards that were ultimately adopted by the Society for Exploration Geophysicists. Paul and colleagues showed that raw seismic data could be gathered on a boat in the North Sea, compressed on board, transmitted by Ku-band satellite, and used in Houston that same day to image below the seafloor. Previously, such images were obtained only after the boat returned to port and the digital tapes were shipped to Houston. Paul was co-inventor on several patents, most related to seismic exploration.
Paul travelled widely, and knew German, Latin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He brought his family on sabbaticals in Grenoble, France (1968) and Campinas, Brasil (1974). Paul loved computer programming and shared that enthusiasm with his children. He also loved Opera and visited many of the great venues in Europe and the United States, seeing the full Ring series on several occasions.
In recent years, Paul lived in Windsor, California with his daughter Julia and granddaughter Jessica, whom he drove to school, frequently took to the frozen yogurt store, and often helped with homework.
For more than a decade, Paul attended the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in both Houston and Santa Rosa. Services will be held at 1:00 PM, Saturday, July 14, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation's Glaser Center, at 547 Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa, CA. Donations in his honor can be made to www.Admetech.org for the advancement of prostate cancer screening, testing and treatment. His surviving family can be reached via paul.rip@ddg.com.