Papers document his professional life as teacher, administrator, and researcher and include correspondence; memoranda; research notes, charts, proposals, and reports; grant applications; outlines, tests, lecture notes, and other teaching materials; manuscripts; minutes; date books; papers and theses by his students; reprints; maps; and his notes while a student at UC Berkeley. Cox studied paleomagnetism and plate tectonics theory; some materials pertain to research done on the Galapagos Islands and in China.

The son of a house painter, Allan attended high school in Santa Ana. He pursued his education through independent reading during 3 years in the merchant marine (1945-48), 3 years of undergraduate chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley (1948-51), and 2 more years of independent reading as a private in the U.S. Army (1951-53). The most important event in his education, and the one that helped him choose geology as a career, was a summer job with the U.S. Geological Survey in 1950 as a field assistant to Clyde Wahrhaftig in Alaska. Allan received his B.A. (1955), M.A. (1957), and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was inspired by the teaching of John Verhoogen and Perry Byerly. He began his professional career at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, where he helped establish what was to become one of the most successful paleomagnetic laboratories in the country. From 1959 to 1967 he worked as a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1967 he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he became Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Geophysics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1969 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. He became president of the American Geophysical Union in 1978. He received the Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union (1969), the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America (1975), and the Vetlesen Prize (1971). In 1979 he became the dean of the School of Earth Sciences. He was an author of over 100 papers in learned scientific journals. He established our Master's degree program in exploration geophysics, and was mentor to many students.

20 Linear feet

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