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Mark Waldo Zemansky (May 5, 1900 – December 29, 1981Bederson, Benjamin, "The Physical Tourist: Physics and New York City", Phys. perspect. 5 (2003) 87–121 © Birkha¨ user Verlag, Basel, 2003. Cf. p.106 &c.) was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the City College of New York for decades and is best known for co-authoring University Physics, an introductory physics textbook, with Francis Sears. The book, first published in 1949, is often referred to as " Sears and Zemansky", although Hugh Young became a coauthor in 1973.
His twin brother, Abraham Philip Zemansky Jr. (Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, '23), died in 1928 at age 28 of sepsis after a mastoid operation. "Deaths: A. Philip Zemansky, Jr.", Journal of the American Medical Association, v. 90, n. 21, May 26, 1928. p. 1727
In 1925, he joined the faculty of City College of New York.Cf. Hofstadter, et al. obituary
Zemansky was a National Research Council fellow, at Princeton University from 1928 to 1930, then at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin from 1930 to 1931. The research he did during that time was in radiation and collision processes of gaseous atoms.
In 1934, he co-authored with Allan C. G. Mitchell, son of the astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell, a seminal treatise entitled "Resonance Radiation and Excited Atoms". Nearly thirty years later, with enhanced interest in resonance phenomena set off by the invention of the laser and the discovery of the Mössbauer effect, the book would be reprinted in 1961.
In the early 1940s, he was involved in helping scientists get out of Germany and into the United States; in 1941, Zemansky and Rudolf Ladenburg helped Fritz Reiche and his family get out of Germany and into the United States securing them aid and academic positions.Bederson, Benjamin, "In Appreciation: and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars", Phys. perspect. 7 (2005) 453–472. Cf.pp.459-460, 470 on Zemansky.
From 1946 to 1956, he was associated with the Cryogenic Laboratory of Columbia University where he collaborated with Henry A. Boorse, an expert on low-temperature physics, on the measurement of heat capacities of superconducting metals and other researches. During this time he was involved in helping Chien-Shiung Wu to arrange for her Wu experiment, in which the violation of parity conservation in was established, to be carried out at the low-temperature laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards.R. P. Hudson (2025). 9780849312472, National Institute of Standards and Technology. ISBN 9780849312472
Zemansky taught for over four decades at the City College of New York until 1967 when he became a Professor Emeritus of Physics. As chairman of the physics department from 1956 to 1959, he brought it into the modern era. From 1963 to 1966 he was the first executive officer of the City University's new doctoral program in physics.
He was active in the American Association of Physics Teachers and was its president in 1951 and its executive secretary from 1967 to 1970.
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