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A tribute to Cecil Green

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	6 August 1900 – 12 April 2003

 
The picture of Cecil Green (1900–2003) appeared on the cover of the very first issue of THE LEADING EDGE (June 1982). It is appropriate that we put it on the cover again, one year after his death, when the Society of Exploration Geophysicists commemorates Cecil's contributions to geophysics and to humanity in general.

Cecil is best known to the world for his philanthropy. Robert Shrock, a professor at MIT and author of a book about Cecil and Ida Green, called them "philanthropists extraordinary." The Greens gave more than $210 million in endowments to various charitable programs.

Before he was a philanthropist, however, Cecil was a geophysicist. When asked how he got into geophysics, he always gave a stock answer. He told a story that took place in his hotel room during the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. As he was lying in bed, some of the plaster from the ceiling fell on him. That was his introduction to geophysical phenomena, he said, and it was exciting.

Cecil was a very able geophysicist. He made his mark with a seminal paper in GEOPHYSICS on how to get velocities from surface seismic measurements, and it is fundamental to every process we carry out today in processing seismic data. It is reproduced in this issue as it first appeared in 1938.

Much has been written about the Greens' generosity. Their gifts ranged all over the map—seed money for programs in education, medicine, science, and other humanitarian and cultural efforts. In the special section that follows, there is no attempt to present a comprehensive or uniform coverage of their extraordinary activity; to do so would require volumes. What follows is a representative sample of the Greens' philanthropy as told by a few individuals at institutions that benefited from . . . [Full Text of this Article]