Anthony Philip French (1920-2017) Physics Teacher

Tony French made major contributions to the teaching of physics. He was a skilled lecturer, a thoughtful user and deviser of lecture demonstrations, author of five valuable textbooks, and a leader in the American and international communities of physics educators. I will briefly review highlights of his interesting life and then present in some detail his ideas for changes in physics education. He maintained that physics instruction should always build up from experimental observations. He also had a particular affection for classical mechanics, but as he came to recognize that its underlying Newtonian ideas are profoundly wrong, he became a strong advocate of changing the content of the introductory physics course to include relativity and quantum phenomena.