Professor James E. Wiss has been selected to receive the Arnold T. Nordsieck Physics Award for Teaching Excellence for the 2011/12 academic year, for his “patient, insightful, and inspiring physics teaching, one problem at a time, that encourages undergraduate students to take their understanding to a new level.”
Wiss said his teaching style is inspired by the excellent teachers he learned from in high school and college (at the University of Illinois): “I try to convey the excitement of the physics of the course I am teaching, engage the class with questions during the lecture, and give them relevant and instructive homework problems to solidify their understanding.”
Wiss regularly appears on the Incomplete List, a registry of teachers ranked as excellent by their students, compiled by the University’s Center for Teaching Excellence.
Department Head Dale Van Harlingen said, “The enthusiastic comments of the students who have benefited from Professor Wiss’s office-hours tutorials attest to the success of his methods and the abiding influence he has had on our students.”
The Nordsiek Award is made possible by a memorial endowment from the family of distinguished Professor Arnold T. Nordsieck (1911-1971), a theorist in the mathematics of computation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1947 to 1961. Among his many contributions, Nordsieck built the first computer to be used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the
differential analyzer. This innovative analog computer was assembled in Urbana in 1950 from $700 worth of surplus World War II supplies, and is today on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, California.