Dave Wall,

Visiting Associate Professor,
Physics Department
University of Arkansas
 

Dave Wall is a physics teacher with a life-long interest in the history and philosophy of science. He is an Emeritus Professor at the City College of San Francisco, where he taught for 32 years. He retired to Fayetteville, bought a home two blocks north of the University and teaches College Physics in summer sessions.

Professor Wall earned his B.S. in Physics at Wichita University and his M.S. in Physics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. while working as an Examiner in the U. S. Patent Office. His “art” in the Patent Office was photocell circuits and applications, the interface between optics and electronics. While finishing his Masters Degree studies and thereafter for two years, he practiced as a Registered Patent Agent, searching the prior art to determine patentability of wide-ranging electrical and mechanical inventions and prosecuting patent applications before the Patent Office.

 In 1970, he joined the faculty at City College of San Francisco and became active in the Northern California & Nevada section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, of which he is twice past-president. In 1992, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Citation by that section, the first such award given. 

Early in his career, Professor Wall discovered the benefits of using San Francisco’s Exploratorium as a teaching tool, basing homework problems and exam questions on Exploratorium exhibits. While his daughter was in middle school, he started a user’s group known as the Exploratorium Club And Cookie Eating Society, giving middle school students greater access to the exhibits during hours that the museum was otherwise closed to the public. He spent a summer attending Kellogg Foundation sponsored workshops designed for museum professionals. He also instituted a City College physics course for the non-scientist taught at the Exploratorium and based on exhibits. The course was taught for many years by Paul Hewitt, a famous colleague and textbook author, until Professor Hewitt retired. Afterward it was taught by Professor Wall.  

Also early in his career, Professor Wall developed an interest in the use of performance magic as a teaching tool. He has taken his traveling road show “The Physics of Magic and Vice-Versa” in its various reincarnations on the road on numerous occasions and is always well received. In an early version of the Physics Of Magic, he shared the stage with the great Professor Harvey White of U.C. Berkeley and filled the auditorium at the Lawrence Hall of Science at $200 per seat. There were six Nobel laureates in physics in the audience. His greatest honor, however, was to be invited to present the evening show at the American Association of Physics Teachers 1998 Summer Meeting. The following year, he was invited to take his show to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Professor Wall also teaches workshops on the use of rope magic as a teaching tool. In fact, it was an invitation to do his show and workshop at the 2001 Fall Meeting of the Arkansas-Okalahoma-Kansas section of the AAPT that led him to decide to retire in Fayetteville.

Professor Wall is the author of a textbook for preparatory physics, Introductory Physics, a Problem Solving Approach¹. designed for college students who have not had high school physics. That textbook is now in second edition with his daughter as co-author.

¹ Introductory Physics, a Problem Solving Approach by Jesse David Wall & Elender Wall, Illustrated by Paul G. Hewitt. ISBN 1-890493-04-X Analog Press, San Francisco,