I am sad to hear of the passing of Professor Reid. I had Professor Reid for graduate QM in 1983-84. He was very inspiring to me as a young graduate student. He was so thoroughly prepared for each class and his homework solutions (hand done) were gems. I learned more from his extensive HW sets and side notes in that course than in any other in grad school. He was quite funny too. I'll never forget a few "Reidisms" from our day. He used to say that "37" was the perfect number over and over. He also used to go out of his way to make sure things were correct. One day while I was reading Baym, I noticed some pencil corrections in my book that looked like his handwriting. I approached him on this and he said that he went into my office on the weekend and corrected all the misprints in the book because he knew I was actually reading the book and he wanted it to be correct for me. Wow! He also was a major inspiration to me as a new grad student fresh out of the Navy. It had been 5 years since ugrad for me and I went to get some help one day on a simple matrix problem. While he was explaining what to do, he said, "Are you sure you should be in graduate school?" He wasn't trying to be mean, just reflecting to me how hard I should be working and at what level. It was the single most motivating comment I ever got and really made me get things into gear.

Michael Hayden
Professor and Chair
Department of Physics, UMBC