William R. Dickinson

William R. Dickinson was an American geologist who lived from 1931 to 2015 and spent his career largely at Stanford University and later the University of Arizona, renowned for his contributions to plate tectonics, sedimentary geology and the geology of the Pacific. He developed the Gazzi-Dickinson method and QFL provenance diagrams for classifying sandstones by their tectonic setting, tools still widely used in sedimentary petrology, and later applied similar techniques to archaeological pottery fragments from Pacific islands. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1994, received its William H. Twenhofel Medal in 2001 and Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award in 2014, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 2015 during a field expedition to Nuku alofa, Tonga. He received the Penrose Medal in 1991.