Emeritus Professor of Physics Jacob Daniel Kimel 1937 – 2020 Dan Kimel graduated with a PhD in Physics from University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1965 and joined FSU in 1966 fist as a post doc, then Assistant Professor, advanced to Associate and Full Professor in 1988 and retired in 2003.In the late 1960’s some of us worked on pion physics, namely pi-pi scattering. Experimentalists got the data from pion – proton interactions, but did not fit any theoretical prediction. This is where theoretical physicist Prof Kimel (with another colleague) came to be known by modifying the scattering theory with what we called absorption that fitted the data very well. Those were the exciting days when new discoveries were being made often and we experimentalist needed direction from theorists to interpret the data. Dan taught mostly graduate physics coursed and prepared the graduate students for their physics career. He received a teaching award in 1991. His research effort was continuously funded by the US Department of Energy and its predecessor agencies. He was a member of the United Faculty [VH1] of Florida and served as president of the FSU branch from 1996 through 2002.
Dan Kimel may have been even better known in the community of constitutional lawyers than he was in the physics community. Dan was the lead plaintiff in Kimel v Florida Board of Regents, which was decided by the US Supreme Court in 2000. Dan was president of the FSU UFF chapter at that point, and the lawsuit was an age discrimination lawsuit - the argument was that older faculty were being discriminated against by the SUS policies on faculty pay. The suit was brought under a federal law, and the defense by the Board of Regents was that states did not have to obey the federal age discrimination statute because of sovereign immunity. The case was one of a series of important states' rights cases. Of course, Dan et al. lost. But he got a press conference with Ted Kennedy out of it. Another notable piece of this story is that there was a lot of statistical work to do in connection with the case. Dan did it himself. After all, how many attorneys have the mathematical skills to do statistics? - Paul Cottle, Nuclear Experiment Professor
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