Walter A Harrison is a Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He received a Bachelor of Engineering Physics degree at Cornell University in 1953, and a PhD degree in 1956 under Frederick Seitz at the University of Illinois. After nine years as a physicist in the General Electric Research Laboratory he moved to Stanford in 1965. He is the author of three widely used texts and some 200 technical papers. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, in 1970-71. He received a Senior Scientist von Humboldt Award for 1982, and carried out research in the Max-Planck-Institut für Festkorperforschung in Stuttgart. Professor Harrison is a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.