Having received the request to write this citation for Ed White, I began by browsing through his list of published articles. Although I had gone through many of them throughout the years, my curiosity was aroused by one that had thus far escaped me, Computed waveforms in transversely isotropic media, which appeared in the May 1982 issue of Geophysics. I began to read; and the more I read, the more I wanted to read. Rather than launch into my citation, I got distracted: I was learning some geophysics about which I knew little. All at once it dawned on me why Ed White is receiving our Society's highest award: he is a teacher par excellence, one who not only has created new science, but one who knows how to communicate his ideas in lucid and polished prose.
Ed is a living contradiction of the old canard that no scientist produces anything worthwhile beyond age thirty (or is it forty?). His creative career spans more than 45 years. He conducted research for the US Navy during World War II, and became the director of the MIT Underwater Sound Laboratory. After receiving a Ph.D. in physics and electrical engineering from MIT in 1949, he spent the next two decades in industry first with Mobil, then with Marathon, and subsequently with Globe Universal Sciences. At an age when many might contemplate a life of comfortable committee work while resting on previously acquired laurels, Ed began a second and equally challenging career as a teacher and he is still going strong as I write.
Ed has made significant advances in several major fields of geophysics. He was among the first to deal with the theoretical aspects of what today is known as "full-waveform sonic logging," and he did some of the earlier work in vertical seismic profiling. During his years at Mobil, he and his co-workers carried out a classical study which measured the attenuation of shear and compressional waves in the Pierre Shale, and which they published in Geophysics in 1958. In 1973, and sparked by the surge of interest in "bright spots," Ed developed a model to account for the observed high attenuation of partially gas saturated porous rocks. Shear waves captured Ed's interest early on, and he and a co-worker at Mobil filed a patent on Shear wave exploration in 1952. Ed's work with shear waves in turn led him to investigate stress wave phenomena in a transversely isotropic medium, with important implications on our ability to understand observed anisotropy in rocks. Ed's impressive list of papers in these areas is complemented by three books: the first Seismic Waves, appeared in 1965 and has become a standard reference work. The second, Underground Sound, was published in 1983. A third volume, co-authored with his one-time associate Ray Sengbush, deals with the newly emerging fields of production seismology and is about to appear in print.
A prolific technical career hardly kept Ed from contributing his time to the affairs of many technical societies. He was a Vice-President of the SEG in 1964-1965, and served as our President from 1967 to 1968. He is an Honorary Member of the SEG and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America; the Maurice Ewing Medal is merely the latest in Ed's long series of professional awards. Over the years, Ed participated in numerous international scientific programs: he was a delegate of the US State Department for the 1965 US-USSR geophysics exchange, an exchange scientist to the USSR and Yugoslavia for the National Academy of Sciences in 1973-74, and an Esso Visiting Professor to the University of Sydney in 1975.
Ed's scientific accomplishments are of course his own. Yet I wonder whether he would have achieved the recognition and status he now enjoys without the encouragement and understanding he has received from Courtenay, his wife of many years, and from his children.
I first met Ed when he interviewed me for a job eons ago while I was a graduate student at MIT. Little did I imagine then that some thirty years later I would be writing the citation for such a respected colleague and warm friend. The SEG honors Ed White for his singular achievements as a scholar and as a teacher. As long as our profession can attract people of Ed's talents and dedication, the future for geophysics is not bleak, not now, not ever.

Sven Treitel