M. Gordon Wolman

Markley Gordon Wolman was an American geographer and geomorphologist, born in 1924 in Baltimore, Maryland, and died in 2010. Working with Luna Leopold at the United States Geological Survey, he helped transform geomorphology from a descriptive into a quantitative discipline by developing methods for measuring river depth, velocity and the size of streambed pebbles, a technique now known as the Wolman pebble count that remains standard practice. He co-authored the 1964 textbook Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, considered a seminal work in the field.