Photo 2006, courtesy Prof. Sargent
Wallace Leslie William Sargent
15 February 1935	1994 Bruce Medalist

Wal Sargent was the first person from his high school to attend a university. He studied fluid mechanics at the University of Manchester, but with an eye toward applying it to theoretical problems in astrophysics. He has spent nearly all of his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he has become a spectroscopist, observing peculiar stars, stars in the galactic halo, and peculiar galaxies and quasars. He is particularly renowned for investigations of quasar absorption lines, which he now does with the Keck, Chandra, and Hubble Space Telescopes. As director of the Palomar Observatory from 1997-2000, he supervised use of the Hale Telescope to conduct the Norris Survey of large-scale structure in the distribution of galaxies at moderate redshifts and the Samuel Oschin Telescope to conduct the Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. His surveys of active galactic nuclei have produced evidence that many contain massive black holes. He has also worked on the isotropy of the universe by studying angular fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Personal Web Page
At Caltech

Presentation of Bruce medal
unpublished

Other awards
American Astronomical Society, Helen B. Warner Prize, 1969; Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, 2001.
American Institute of Physics & American Astronomical Society, Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, 1991 [reported in Physics Today 44, 6, 128 (June 1991).

Biographical materials
Sargent, Wallace, interview with Alan Lightman, in Lightman, Alan & Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK, 1990), pp. 120-35.
Sargent, Wallace, Curriculum Vitae

Photos
An earlier portrait, courtesy Caltech
AIP Center for History of Physics
Clemson University Photo Archive in Nuclear Astrophysics

Named after him
Minor Planet #11758 Sargent

More references