Chemistry, whose organization must once have seemed fixed, grew accustomed to replacing its periodic table every few years as new elements were discovered in the nuclear age. Ervin Kenneth Hulet was partially responsible for that trend.
Hulet, '49, a nuclear chemist for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, died June 29 after a fight with lung cancer. He was 84.
Born in Baker, Ore., Hulet began college at Washington State and Oregon State universities before joining the Navy and serving on a Caribbean antisubmarine patrol during World War II. After his discharge, Hulet sought his chemistry degree at Stanford, while he courted Betty Gardner, a nursing student in San Francisco. They married the year he graduated.
Hulet got a PhD from Berkeley in 1953 and thereafter worked at the Livermore lab until he retired in 1991. He built on the knowledge concerning two new elements, einsteinium and fermium, that he and colleagues first identified in atmospheric dust after the first hydrogen bomb test in 1952 in the Pacific. Hulet discovered element number 106—which he dubbed seaborgium after his mentor Glenn Seaborg—and helped find another super-heavy atomic nucleus, mendelevium-258.
Hulet was predeceased in 1991 by his wife. He is survived by his son, Randy, '78; his daughter, Carri Hulet Gicker; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
—Scott Bland, ’10
