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Our families knew each other, and were dear friends for something like 50 years, and remained so in the wake of the deaths of my father, Melvin, in 1986, Louise in 2011, and my mother, Bertel, in 2020 . Allan and Louise were among the 4 guests the four of us invited to my father's 50th birthday celebration at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. In the wake of the passing of Louise, I would make frequent trips to the Kaufman home in Orinda, where Allan and I enjoyed hanging out, and talking about the books that we were currently reading ( I did my best to keep up with him in science. I was a math major in college, but that was 40 years ago ! ), and occasionally going out to lunch or dinner in Orinda or Walnut Creek. Allan, my mother and I would also occasionally go the the movies: most recently these included biopics of the mathematicians Allan Turing and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and A United Kingdom, about the love story between the king of Botswana and his British wife. There are so many wonderful memories, and I have done my best to record them on facebook, where one and all are welcome to visit.
~Mark Borowsky, M.D.
I was a student in Professor Kaufman's plasma physics class as a graduate student in Berkeley from 1975-1980. I work in space plasma physics and teach at the University of Minnesota, and Allan's lecture notes formed the basis for my own notes for the Plasma Physics course that I teach at Minnesota. He was also on my thesis committee and made many thoughtful comments on my thesis, even though he wasn't my official advisor. In later years, I met him from time to time at meetings of the American Geophysical Union as he pursued his interest in the dynamics of ocean waves. On one occasion, I saw him at the AGU poster of a grad student who was a student of my own graduate student, and he was so pleased to meet his scientific great-granddaughter. He was a great influence on my own career as well as that of many others, and I was saddened to hear of his passing.
~Bob Lysak
Allan Kaufman was my PhD advisor, 1972-1975. Allan had a profoundly positive influence on my scientific and professional career. I was also fortunate to enjoy Allan and Louise Kaufman's personal friendship for over forty years. Allan took a very elegant approach to theoretical plasma physics, statistical mechanics, and chaos theory. Louise was a very elegant lady and very warm and gracious. As an advisor Allan was unfailingly conscientious, thorough, and patient with his students. Allan was a gentleman and never suffered any excess of ego or academic arrogance. With Allan's encouragement I worked up my notes of his lectures from his graduate plasma theory course into a book (Kaufman and Cohen, Theoretical Plasma Physics) published in 2019 in the Lecture Notes series in the Journal of Plasma Physics. Allan was loved and revered by several generations of PhD students spanning the 4+ decades of his tenure in the Berkeley Physics Department, students who went onto very successful careers in plasma physics and applied physics.
~Bruce I Cohen
Dr. Kaufman was a wonderful instructor. I took Physics 142 with him, and it led to a love of plasma physics. He was an independent thinker. He was also a kind and thoughtful man. I will miss him.
~Lynne Jolitz
I am so lucky to have been Allan's post-doc for two years, 1976-1977. Certainly back then I didn't have much of an idea of the culture I entered: I had come to the US as a student in 1973, a difficult time for physicists hence an easy time for those few who wanted to enter the field. As a result, I was the lone PhD student at Cornell so that I lacked the friendship of colleagues. But, that was amply compensated for by getting into Allan's group at LBL, on the hill. Somehow he had attracted around him a group of very good, dynamic people with which it was good to work. I remember fondly Gary Smith, with whom I wrote a really nice paper that taught me a lot about one of Allan's interests, chaos theory, and who later went to LLNL after which he became a financial advisor. There was Jim Meiss and Robert Littlejohn, both future math professors, John Cary who drove a corvette and became a professor cum physics entrepreneur, and Bruce Cohen who became one of the beter-known numerical plasma physicists at LLNL as well. Allan was also known for his work on nonlinear plasma physics, hence he attracted colleagues such as Lennard Stenflo, a professor from Sweden with whom I wrote my most-referenced paper. I just happened to be so wrapped up in continuing work related to my thesis that Allan had difficulty in pulling me into his orbit: it was only later that I realized I missed my opportunity to learn so much more from him than I actually did. And, I didn't help him as much as I should have, in retrospect: at the time I didn't recognize that famous professors still had to justify their funding to DoE program managers, and that joint papers with the Principal Investigator were really helpful therein. So, Allan, hereby my apologies: you were too nice to me.
~Nino R. Pereira