Richard Raspet—Professor, advisor, mentor, and friend

I worked and studied under Richard Raspet in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of Mississippi. This presentation will recount memories of my time with Rich at Ole Miss. The Physical Acoustics Research Group at Ole Miss consisted of Raspet, Henry Bass, and James Sabatier. We studied long-range atmospheric sound propagation and did both computational and experimental studies. Our laboratory was located in the deteriorating Old Band Building at Ole Miss, but we moved to the brand-new National Center for Physical Acoustics facility in the early 1990s. Rich was a respected physics faculty member, who taught graduate courses in Acoustics, Classical Mechanics, and Statistical Mechanics. Graduate students wanted him to teach their courses, especially the difficult ones. His instruction was rigorous and thorough. He always found a way for students to relate to obscure theoretical material. Rich studied many aspects of sound propagation including propagation modeling using the fast field program, normal modes, the parabolic equation, and ray theory. He studied complex ground impedance, atmospheric turbulence, wind and temperature gradients, and their effects on sound propagation in the atmosphere. He also studied thermoacoustics and made several contributions to that field.