David Hawkins, distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ at Boulder and the official historian of the Manhattan Project, died Sunday at the age of 88.
A memorial service will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 2, in Old Main Chapel on the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder campus.
"A giant hole has been created in all of our lives by his passing," said James Scarritt, ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder political science professor.
"The remarkable thing about David was that he had thought so deeply about so many important matters," said philosophy Professor Emeritus Forrest Williams. "His teaching and his many writings had an influence on many other thinkers in education theory, political and social theory, economics, mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy.
"I have always thought of him as our very own 'Renaissance' man. His intellectual achievements were exceeded only by his modesty regarding them," Williams said.
Hawkins retired from ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder in 1982 after a 35-year teaching career during which he won numerous prestigious honors and awards. In 1981 he received a $300,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, better known as the "genius grant," the first awarded to a ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder faculty member.
He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a visiting professor at colleges and universities in the United States, England, Canada and Italy.
He also was official historian of the Manhattan Project, which ushered in the creation of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
Hawkins was a 30-year-old philosophy instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, when he became an administrative aide at the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943 and later the project's historian in 1945-46.
In that role he had free access to all the top people involved, including project director J. Robert Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller.
However, Hawkins did not attend the testing when the first atomic bomb was exploded on a 10-story steel tower in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. In an interview in ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder's Summit magazine in 1990, Hawkins said he could have had a grandstand seat but did not want to see the explosion.
"When people came back from the test they were manic, joyous, delirious. I was upset by that reaction," he recalled, even though he understood the emotions of physicists who had dedicated themselves to making the project work.
In 1970 Hawkins and his wife, Frances, a leader in early childhood education, founded the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ campus-based Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, which provided advanced education for elementary and pre-school teachers.
Hawkins was the featured speaker at ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥-Boulder's summer commencement ceremony in 1999.