Thomas H. Stix

Who was Thomas H. Stix?

Thomas Howard Stix was an American physicist. Stix performed seminal work in plasma physics, and wrote the first mathematical treatment of the field in 1962's The Theory of Plasma Waves.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1924, Stix graduated from John Burroughs School and served in the U.S. Army as a radio expert in the Pacific theater during and after World War II. After the war, he obtained his bachelor's degree from Caltech and, in 1953, his doctorate from Princeton.

He worked for Project Matterhorn, the secret U.S. study of nuclear fusion, and developed the Stix coil to contain gases that were heated to solar temperatures with electromagnetic waves.

Stix taught astrophysical sciences at Princeton, and did much of his research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

In 1980, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics.

He died April 16, 2001, of leukemia. His obituary in the New York Times read, in part, that Stix's "elegant mastery of the literally infinite complexities of waves in electrified gases helped create a new field of science."