M. Gordon Wolman

M. Gordon Wolman was an American geographer and hydrologist who lived from 1924 to 2010, the son of sanitary engineer Abel Wolman, who chaired the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University for twenty years. Working with Luna Leopold at the United States Geological Survey in the 1950s, he helped transform geomorphology from a descriptive to a quantitative discipline, co-authoring the seminal 1964 textbook Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology with Leopold and John Miller, and devised the Wolman Pebble Count, a standard method for measuring riverbed particle sizes still in use. His applied work included contributions to Maryland 1970 sediment and erosion control law and leadership of the Oyster Roundtable addressing decline in the Chesapeake Bay. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988 and the National Academy of Engineering in 1992, and shared the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science with Leopold in 2006. He received the Penrose Medal in 1999. He is also live on this family own earth atlas under the same name, a legitimate width mint of the same historically significant scientist rather than a duplication.