In MemoriamMinze Stuiver 1929-2020

Abstract

Minze Stuiver, Professor Emeritus of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington where he founded the Quaternary Isotope Laboratory (QIL), passed away on December 26, 2020. Minze was born at the beginning of the Depression on October 25, 1929, in Vlagtwedde, the Netherlands, where he grew up in a rudimentary home with his five family members, a single cold water faucet and stove in the kitchen, a stove in the living room for heating, and a weekly bath with a bucket of water warmed up by the living room stove. His life and high school education (1942– 1945)were greatly disrupted byGerman occupation during WWII, including nearly being conscripted into German forced labor near the end of the War. Minze started his undergraduate life at the University of Groningen in 1947, studying physics, mathematics, and astronomy. After graduation in 1950, he embarked on graduate studies at the University of Groningen, receiving his M.S. degree in experimental nuclear physics and mathematics in 1953 and a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1958. There Minze worked under the direction of Hessel de Vries, who had been actively involved in developing radiocarbon methodologies and hardware, and who observed systematic discrepancies between radiocarbon and calendar dates (now known as the “de Vries effect”), forming the basis for calibration in radiocarbon dating. Minze worked with de Vries in 1958–1959 tomodel variations in atmospheric radiocarbon content, from which he identified a linkage of radiocarbon production to sunspot activity. Minze and his wife Anneke moved to the Yale University Geochronometric Laboratory in 1960, where he helped develop the Yale Radiocarbon Laboratory, of which he subsequently became Director. Additionally, he became closely involved with the journal Radiocarbon, which originated at Yale as the Radiocarbon Supplement to the American Journal of Science. Minze became one of several early editors of Radiocarbon, but by 1977 he was the Editor-in-Chief and instituted a policy whereby the journal would no longer almost exclusively publish date lists from radiocarbon laboratories around the world, but would encourage submission of articles describing research to which radiocarbon measurements were applied. While