Loyal Durand

Loyal Durand (also known as L. Durand III or Randy Durand) is an American theoretical physicist and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is recognized for his contributions to high-energy particle physics, especially phenomenological models of scattering and applications of QCD, contributions to special functions and mathematical physics, and work at the Aspen Center for Physics.

Early life and education Loyal Durand earned his B.S. in Physics from Yale University in 1953.

Career After completing his doctorate, Durand held postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (1957-1959) and Brookhaven National Laboratory (1959-1961). He joined the Yale faculty in 1961 and remained there until 1965, when he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a full professor of physics, a position he held until his retirement as Professor Emeritus. He has held visiting or staff positions at (or served on advisory committees for) major national laboratories including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Durand’s association with the Aspen Center for Physics began in 1962 and continued for more than six decades. He served as Chair of the Executive Committee (1968-1972), President (1972-1976), Trustee (1968-1980), and has been an Honorary Trustee since 1980. In addition to these organizational roles, he helped in documenting the Center’s history through essays and oral history interviews that preserve the early development of theoretical physics programs at the institution.

An early paper in high-energy phenomenology was his 1968 collaboration with R. Lipes on a diffraction model for high-energy proton-proton scattering.

Representative of his work on special functions is the 1976 paper with P. M. Fishbane and L. M. Simmons, Jr., on expansion formulas and addition theorems for Gegenbauer functions.

In later work he explored semihard QCD effects, the relationship between virtual and real scattering cross sections, and other topics that extended into publications through the 2010s.

Honors and leadership Durand was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1971.

His long-term leadership at the Aspen Center for Physics, combined with his efforts to document its institutional history, has been acknowledged within the theoretical physics community.

In October 1970 he married physicist Bernice Durand (née Black). The couple collaborated on multiple research papers and jointly endowed undergraduate research scholarships in physics and astronomy at the University of Wisconsin and Iowa State University. Bernice Durand died in February 2022.

Selected publications