Obituary: Grover Preston Burns Sr.
Grover Preston Burns Sr., a retired physics professor and former chairman of the Mary Washington Department of Physics, died in October 2005. He was at the University from 1948 to 1969.
Originally from West Virginia, Dr. Burns was genuinely precocious, graduating from high school at the age of 15, and from college at 19. Subsequently, he served as a mathematics and physics teacher at his old high school. Later, he completed graduate work in physics and took a position as head of the statistical analysis department at FMC Corp. in Fredericksburg and a teaching position at Mary Washington College, then the Women’s Division of the University of Virginia. He balanced a full-time teaching load with his full-time job. In the late 1960s, he gave up the FMC position and became a research mathematician at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren.
As a research scientist, Dr. Burns owned a number of patents for his inventions, including a thermometer and electrical conductivity tester. As a teacher and an individual, he was at once rigorous, enthusiastic, soft-spoken and kind.
In his spare time, he enjoyed golf. He was intensely proud of his daughter, Julia Corinne Burns Jefferson ’67, physics major at Mary Washington; and his son, Grover Preston Burns Jr., a Fredericksburg-area dentist.
Among the pallbearers at Dr. Burns’ funeral were Herb Cover, professor emeritus of chemistry; and Bulent Atalay, professor of physics. The deceased physicist likely would have approved of the fact that his two former colleagues were correctly assigned the positions at the center-of-gravity of the casket.