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In Memoriam

Ed Aboufadel (Grand Valley State University) is editor of "In Memoriam." Please send relevant information to him at inmemoriam@maa.org.

2023

 

Ruth Favro passed away on December 8, 2023, at the age of 85. She was a professor emerita at Lawrence Technological University (MI) and a member of the MAA for 43 years. Favro was very active in the MAA, especially the Michigan section. She was chairperson of the section in 2001-02 and the representative to the MAA Board of Governors for 2004-07. Favro was deeply involved in mathematics competitions, directing the Michigan Math Prize Competition from 1991 to 1994, and coaching top students in that competition to represent the state in the American Regions Mathematics League (ARML). Nationally, her MAA activities included work on the AWM-MAA Joint Committee on the Etta Z. Falconer Lecture and the Committee on the Participation of Women. For all of these contributions and more, Favro received the Michigan section’s Distinguished Service Award in 2010, the national MAA Meritorious Service Award in 2012, and the Samuel L. Geitzer Distinguished Coach award from ARML in 2015. Her care for others in the mathematics community is reflected in a retrospective from Lawrence Tech (published a few weeks before her passing) and her obituary.

Jean-Pierre Ehrmann passed away on November 14, 2023, at the age of 72. A member of the MAA for 16 years, he made notable contributions to the study of classical geometry. Ehrmann lived in Clichy, France, and does not appear to have been associated with any college or university.

Ira Ewen passed away on October 26, 2023, at the age of 92. He was a life member of the MAA, maintaining membership for 43 years. Ewen was a mathematics teacher and administrator in the New York Public School system during his career, serving ultimately as the Head of Mathematics/Innovation for the school system before his retirement. His legacy of students who went on to achieve at the highest levels was described in an extensive MAA Math Values column in 2022. He was also a leading light in the New York bridge community. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Vic Levine passed away on October 18, 2023, at the age of 75. He was a mathematics teacher at Madison Memorial High School in Wisconsin (now renamed Vel Phillps Memorial High School) until he retired and was a member of the MAA for 35 years. In 1999, he was a recipient of the MAA’s Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School and High School. Levine was also a reader, table leader, and question leader for the AP calculus exams for many years. More information about his life and career can be found in an article focusing on his successful work as a hockey coach, and his obituary.

Edwin O'Shea passed away on September 26, 2023, at the age of 45. He was an associate professor at James Madison University and a member of the MAA for 10 years. For the MAA, O’Shea was on the editorial board for Mathematics Magazine, and he published in the Magazine, in Math Horizons, and the MAA Found Math gallery. More information about his life and career is available in his obituary.

Larry Knop passed away on September 9, 2023, at the age of 82. Knop was Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Emeritus at Hamilton College (NY) and a member of the MAA for 46 years. While Knop retired officially in 2013, he continued to teach as part of the Mohawk Consortium College in Prison Program. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from Hamilton College and his obituary.

William Young passed away on August 24, 2023, at the age of 75. He was a member of the MAA for 51 years.

Calvin C. Moore passed away on July 26, 2023, at the age of 86. He was Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and a member of the MAA for 49 years. Moore was well known for his work in the theory of operator algebras and topological groups, summarized in an overview by Roger Howe. He co-founded the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI)) at Berkeley in 1982, and he wrote a notable history of mathematics at Berkeley in 2007. More information about Moore’s career can be found on his Wikipedia page.

Edward Thurber passed away on July 9, 2023, at the age of 82. He was Professor Emeritus at Biola University and a member of the MAA for 48 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jerome Minkus passed away in June 2023, at the age of 87. He was a member of the MAA for 21 years. Minkus published an article in the Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society.

Robert Zimmer passed away on May 23, 2023, at the age of 75. Zimmer is best known for serving as the president of the University of Chicago from 2006 to 2021, where he was best known for his advocacy for freedom of expression in higher education. As a mathematician, Zimmer was the author of two books and more than 80 research articles, specializing in geometry, particularly in ergodic theory and Lie theory. Significantly more information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from the University of Chicago, an article from Brown University, and his Wikipedia page.

Jim Vandergriff passed away on May 4, 2023, at the age of 76. He was Professor Emeritus at Austin Peay State University and a member of the MAA for 31 years. Vandergriff received the MAA’s Southeastern Section’s Distinguished Service Award in 2013, and he coached several teams of students in MAA competitions. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Dorothy Wolf passed away on April 5, 2023. She was a member of the MAA for 68 years and lived to the age of 102! Wolfe was Professor Emerita at Widener University, retiring in 1985. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Gerhard H. Bold was a member of the MAA for 18 years, and his death was reported to the MAA in April 2023. Bold was born in April 1944 and lived in Pennsylvania.

Tom Osler passed away on March 26, 2023, at the age of 82. He was a full professor at Rowan University until his death and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Osler was known in mathematics for his contributions to fractional calculus. He was also a national champion in distance running and a member of the Road Runners Club of America Hall of Fame. His career was celebrated at “Oslerfest” in 2010, and he received the Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics from the New Jersey Section of the MAA in 2009. More information about his life and career can be found in a 2009 article from Rowan University, an interview from that year regarding his running career, his Wikipedia page, a retrospective in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the guest book from the funeral home.

Lieven Vanhecke passed away on March 11, 2023, at the age of 83. He was Emeritus Full Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and a member of the MAA for 51 years. Vanhecke was well-known for his contributions to differential geometry and topology, and a photograph from 1981 is available.

Seymour Haber was a member of the MAA for 24 years, and his death was reported to the MAA in March 2023. Haber, born in 1929, was professor emeritus at Temple University. Earlier in his career, he worked for the National Bureau of Standards for over two decades. Brief information about his life and career is available.

Hobert Corley passed away on February 25, 2023, at the age of 72. A member of the MAA for 50 years, Corley worked as a mathematics teacher at several schools in West Virginia throughout his career, as well as West Virginia Wesleyan College. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Theresa Michnowicz passed away on February 24, 2023, at the age of 88. She retired from New Jersey City University as Professor Emerita of Mathematics in 2017 and was a member of the MAA for 58 years. Michnowicz was awarded the Sr. Stephanie Sloyan MAA New Jersey Section Award for Distinguished Service in 2006 for her work for the New Jersey section, including serving as chair of the section for two years. She also received the MAA Certificate of Meritorious Service in 1995. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Solomon L. Willis passed away unexpectedly on February 20, 2023, at the age of 45. He was the Mathematics and Education Department Chair at Cleveland Community College and a member of the MAA for 12 years. Along with postings of condolences, more information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Maurice Frank passed away on February 13, 2023, at the age of 80. He was a Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Illinois Tech and a member of the MAA for 52 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

David Singmaster passed away on February 13, 2023, at the age of 84. He was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England and a member of the MAA for 54 years. Singmaster was a pioneer of recreational mathematics, coming to international prominence for his book on the mathematical solution to the Rubik’s Cube in the early 1980’s. Among his other publications, he was the co-author of a translation of “Problems to Sharpen the Young” in 1992. Much more information about Singmaster’s life and career can be found in a remembrance from Rob Eastaway, reflections from members of the Gathering4Gardner group, and his Wikipedia page.

Karen Keene passed away on February 12, 2023, at the age of 68. She was a member of the MAA for 12 years. Keene was a well-known and active member of the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education community, including the MAA SIGMAA on RUME. Faculty appointments included a position at North Carolina State University and department chair at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Keene was also a rotating program officer at the National Science Foundation. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Tanya Leise passed away on January 18, 2023, at the age of 51. She was the Brian E. Boyle Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Amherst College and a member of the MAA for 22 years. Leise was an applied mathematician whose work focused on biomathematics, and she was known for her 2006 article (with Kurt Bryan) on the linear algebra foundation of Google’s search engine. For the MAA, Leise served on the Joint Committee on Women, the College Mathematics Journal editorial board, and the committee for the Halmos and Ford awards, among others. More information about her life and career can be found in this remembrance from Amherst and her Wikipedia page.

Martin Davis passed away on January 1, 2023, at the age of 94. He was an emeritus professor at New York University since retiring in 1996 and a member of the MAA for 35 years. Davis was an eminent logician known for his trailblazing work in the areas of computational complexity theory, recursive function theory, and mathematical logic. In particular, he is credited as one of the solvers of Hilbert’s 10th problem. In acknowledgement of his outstanding contributions, Davis was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize, the MAA’s Chauvenet Prize, and the MAA’s Lester R. Ford Award. He was also the author of several well-received books in computing and logic, including Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer. Remembrances and considerable other information about his life and career can be found in commentary from Bill Gasarch, a memoriam with photographs from his son Harold, an obituary in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, an article from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Wikipedia page. In addition, in honor of his career in computing theory, ChatGPT was utilized to write an obituary.

2022

 

Sally Lipsey passed away on November 26, 2022, at the age of 95. She was a professor at Brooklyn College (NY) before she retired. Lipsey was a member of the MAA for 75 years, starting in 1947! More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Patricia Clark Kenschaft passed away on November 20, 2022, at the age of 82. Described as “a passionate environmentalist”, she was professor emeritus at Montclair State University and a member of the MAA for 48 years. Kenschaft was the founding chair of the Committee on Participation of Women of the MAA from 1987 to 1993, and she chaired the Committee on Mathematics and the Environment from 2000 to 2004. The New Jersey section of the MAA awarded her the Sr. Stephanie Sloyan Distinguished Service Award in 2012, after she served as Section Governor 2005-08. Additionally, in 2006, she received the Louise Hay Award of the Association for Women in Mathematics for her work “writing about, speaking about, and working for mathematics and mathematics education in the areas of K–12 education, the environment, affirmative action and equity, and public awareness of the importance of mathematics in society”. Kenschaft hosted a live radio talk show called "Math Medley" from 1998 to 2004. For more information about her life and career, see her Wikipedia page, an extensive memorial in a local Montclair paper, and her obituary.

William "Bill" Hassinger passed away on November 3, 2022, at the age of 93. He was a member of the MAA for 52 years. Trained in physics, Hassinger was a supporter of science and mathematics throughout his life. He was the president of a building materials company in North Carolina. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Winfried "Vinny" Just passed away on November 2, 2022, at the age of 64. He was a professor of mathematics at Ohio University and a member of the MAA for several years. Just studied dynamical systems and the applications of mathematics to biology, focusing on COVID-19 before his death. He was memorialized in an article from Ohio University.

William J. Gorman passed away on October 9, 2022, at the age of 84. He was a member of the MAA for 52 years. At Purdue University, Dr. Gorman was a vital and beloved part of the computer science department until he retired in 2018, as described in this tribute.

Herbert Dulle passed away on September 29, 2022, at the age of 84. Dulle was a member of the MAA for 11 years, and he was a high school mathematics teacher for over 30 years in Illinois. A tribute to his teaching, including lecture notes from Dulle’s calculus class, was published by one of his students. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

H. Chandler Davis passed away on September 24, 2022, at the age of 96. He was a member of the MAA for 58 years. He was a specialist in linear algebra and operator theory, as well as a significant contributor to numerical analysis and fractal geometry. He is best known as a political activist for human rights who was imprisoned in the 1950’s for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his release from prison, Davis joined the faculty at the University of Toronto, where he worked until he retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1992. In the mathematics community, he served an Editor-in-Chief of the Mathematical Intelligencer and as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. Significantly more information about Davis’ life and career can be found on his Wikipedia page, tributes from the University of Michigan (who fired him in 1954), the University of Toronto, and Joan W. Scott, as well as articles in Jacobin and The Nation.

Jeremy Kilpatrick passed away on September 17, 2022, at the age of 86. He was a life member of the MAA, holding membership for 59 years. Kilpatrick had retired as Regents’ Professor at the University of Georgia, and he was known internationally for his work in mathematics education. He was one of the named editors for Adding It Up, an influential report from the National Research Council in 2001. Among the honors and awards he received was the NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and the Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education from Texas A&M University in 2017. More information about this life and career can be found in this remembrance from NCTM, the start of an interview in a book on leaders in mathematics education, and his obituary. Kilpatrick was also interviewed in a podcast in 2014.

Jean Gregoire passed away on September 11, 2022, at the age of 91. He was a member of the MAA for 73 years! He was an actuary in Canada until his retirement in 2000. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Monty Joseph Strauss passed away on September 9, 2022, at the age of 77. He was an emeritus professor at Texas Tech University and a member of the MAA for 60 years (joining when he was 17). Strauss was the co-author of a calculus text (with Bradley and Smith) and directed an early version of Texas Tech’s South Plains STEM Scholars program. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Ed Sandifer passed away on August 31, 2022, at the age of 70. He was a Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University, retiring in 2009, and a member of the MAA for 29 years. Sandifer was a specialist in the history of Leonhard Euler and he wrote “How Euler Did It”, an online column for the MAA, from 2003 to 2010. These writings were captured in two MAA books. He also completed 37 consecutive Boston Marathons (1973-2009), leading to a remembrance from the Roxbury Road Runners Club and a tribute article before his death entitled “An Eulerian Marathoner”. More information about his career can be found in the citation for the Howard Eves Award that the Northeastern Section of the MAA awarded Sandifer in 2015.

Herbert Kranzer passed away on August 5, 2022, at the age of 90. He was a life member of the MAA, joining when he was 18 and maintaining membership for 72 years! Kranzer was a Putnam Exam Fellow in 1951 and a professor of Mathematics at Adelphi University 38 years. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Ben Fusaro passed away on July 25, 2022, at the age of 97. He was a member of the MAA for 66 years, and continued his participation in MAA activities into his 90’s. An applied mathematician, specializing in environmental mathematics, Fusaro is best known as the founder of the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) in 1985. He was involved in the contest, now known as the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge, for decades. Fusaro also co-edited Environmental Mathematics in the Classroom (with Patricia Clark Kenschaft), available as a classroom resource from the AMS/MAA bookstore. Among his contributions to the MAA, he organized the SIGMAA on Environmental Mathematics which he chaired for ten years. Significantly more information about his life and career can be found in a tribute published in SIAM News (which includes statements from several of his peers) and his obituary.

Herbert Lyon passed away on July 22, 2022, at the age of 79. He was a member of the MAA for 59 years. Lyon served as a faculty member and academic leader at several institutions throughout his long career, such as Chancellor of Anchorage Community College (Alaska) and Black Hawk College (Illinois). Lyon retired in 2007 as Professor of Mathematics at Black Hawk College. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

William R. Livingston passed away on July 20, 2022, at the age of 81. He was emeritus faculty at Missouri Southern State College and a member of the MAA for 58 years. More information about Livingston’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Kenneth Var Saunders passed away on July 13, 2022, at the age of 86. He was a member for 23 years. Saunders was a research engineer and an applied mathematician, with a 40-year career in government and industry, including work for Boeing, the U.S Navy, and the RAND Corporation. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Donald Warren Crowe passed away on July 4, 2022, at the age of 94. He was a member of the MAA for 70 years! Crowe was a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, retiring from teaching in 1998. He was known internationally for his work in geometry, and Crowe was the co-author of the widely-read Excursions into Mathematics. More information about his life and career can be found in this memorial from the University of Wisconsin.

Jerry Farrell passed away on July 4, 2022, at the age of 84. He was professor emeritus at Butler University and a member of the MAA for 53 years. Farrell was best known for his work in recreational mathematics and crossword puzzle construction, especially the 1996 "Election Day" crossword in The New York Times. Farrell and his wife Karen helped organize the biannual Gathering for Gardner (G4G) conferences, an event for people connected with Martin Gardner. Much more information about his life and career can be found on a G4G tribute page, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

H. Norman Ricker passed away on July 2, 2022, at the age of 81. He was a longtime mathematics teacher at New Canaan High School (CT) and a member of the MAA for 45 years. More information about his life and career can be found in a scholarship announcement in his name, and his obituary.

Nathaniel Chafee passed away on June 23, 2022, at the age of 82. He was an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology until he retired in 2001 and a member of the MAA for 46 years. More information about his life and career is available in his obituary.

William M. Priestley passed away on June 22, 2022, at the age of 81. He was the Gaston Swindell Bruton Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus at the University of the South (Sewanee) and a life member of the MAA, with continuous membership for 50 years. Priestley was a Fulbright Scholar in 1979 and author of Calculus: An Historical Approach and Calculus: A Liberal Art. In 2006 he received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Southeastern Section of the MAA. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Lawrence (Lang) Carlton Moore, Jr. passed away on May 23, 2022, at the age of 83. He was an Associate Professor Emeritus at Duke University and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Moore had a distinguished research career focused on nonstandard analysis. Moore and David Smith (also of Duke) were well-known in the calculus reform movement for their Project CALC: Calculus as a Laboratory Course text and materials, much which is now part of the Connected Curriculum Project. Included in the materials is a popular module on the SIR model for the spread of disease. Among his contributions to the MAA was his service on the Committee on Technologies in Mathematics Education (CTME). He was also a visiting mathematician for a year. More information about Moore’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Homer F. Bechtell passed away on May 22, 2022, at the age of 93. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire after retiring in 1996. Bechtell was a member of the MAA for 66 years! He was the author of The Theory of Groups. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Norman W. Riebe passed away on May 17, 2022, at the age of 92. He was a member of the MAA for 72 years! Riebe was a physicist and a mathematician, and he worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory early in his career. Later, he was Professor of Mathematics at Arizona Western College for more than 25 years. Riebe was also an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church, after graduating from seminary in the 1950’s. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Ed Dubinsky passed away on May 8, 2022, at the age of 87. He was a member of the MAA for 38 years, and served the MAA many ways, including as Second Vice President of MAA (1997-2000), chairmanship of MAA Task Force on Publishing Educational Materials and the MAA Task Force on Special Interest Groups, a member of the MAA Committee on Publications. He also formed and was the first chair of the Joint AMS/MAA Committee on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (CRUME), to mention a few. Ed taught mathematics at many universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Sierra Leone, University of Ghana, Tulane University, Purdue University, Georgia State University, and was a Director of the Institute for Retraining in Computer Science (IFRICS). He received an Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher award at Purdue University and a Certificate of Appreciation by the MAA for contribution in Mathematics Education. Ed was well known for developing the APOS Theory, an extension of the Piagetian theory to learning of undergraduate mathematics. He was also instrumental in founding of Research on Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME), the first Interest Group of MAA. More information about Ed’s contribution to undergraduate mathematics education can be found in this report on the formation of the MAA RUME SIGMAA.

Georgia Benkart passed away suddenly on April 29, 2022, at the age of 74. She was an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the MAA for 36 years. Benkart was internationally known for her research in Lie algebras, structure of algebras, quantum groups, representation theory and combinatorics. She was a 2001-02 MAA Polya Lecturer, gave an AMS-MAA Invited Hour Address in 1994 on algebra “told in Dickensian fashion”, and served on several MAA committees. After her retirement from teaching in 2008, Benkart continued her service to the profession as AWM President (2009-2011) and Associate Secretary of the AMS (2010-2020). During this time, she led research groups of early career mathematicians at the Banff research station and MSRI. She was also known for significant contributions to helping women know they belong in mathematics. Substantial information about her life and career can be found in a memorial statement from the University of Wisconsin, a recent article about her research accomplishments in the AMS Notices, her Wikipedia page, and her obituary. In addition, MSRI has collected several tributes to Benkart's life and legacy.

Thomas V. Wencewicz passed away on April 27, 2022, at the age of 79. He served as a Professor of Mathematics at Southeast Missouri State University for 42 years and was a member of the MAA for 55 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Daniel Anderson passed away on April 24, 2022, at the age of 73. He was a Full Professor at the University of Iowa and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Anderson was known for his research in commutative algebra, particularly factorization in commutative rings, publishing over two hundred papers in his career. In 2004, he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring from President George W. Bush. He was also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. More information about Anderson’s life and career can be found in this memorial from the University of Iowa’s mathematics department and his obituary.

Harry Lucas passed away on April 18, 2022, at the age of 90. A member of the MAA for 23 years, he was the chairman of the Lucas Petroleum Group in Texas. A generous proponent of the Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) methods that he learned at the University of Texas, Lucas created the Educational Advancement Foundation to promote IBL, helped fund IBL centers at four institutions, and provided funding MAA Project NExT participants over the years. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance in MAA Focus by Michael Starbird, and an obituary.

Jerry Becker passed away on April 16, 2022, at the age of 85. He was a member of the MAA for 40 years. Becker was an active member of the faculty as a professor at Southern Illinois University up until his death, and he was internationally known for his expertise in mathematics education. Among his service to the profession during his career, Becker was on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) board of directors and as president and as a board member of the School Science and Mathematics Association. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary (which includes a tribute wall) and a remembrance from SIU.

Robert J. Betts passed away on April 18, 2022, at the age of 69. He was a member of the MAA for five years, and more information about his career can be found on this page.

Mohamed M Azzedine was a member of the MAA for 31 years, and his death was reported to the MAA in June 2022. Azzedine was born in April 1941 and lived in Paris.

Douglas R. Stocks passed away on March 6, 2022, at the age of 89. He was associate professor emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a life member of the MAA, with continuous membership for 67 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Steven Lay passed away on March 1, 2022, at the age of 77. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Lee University (TN) and a member of the MAA for 54 years. Lee authored or co-authored several undergraduate mathematics texts, including a well-known linear algebra text with his brother David Lay. More information about his life and career is available in a remembrance from Aurora University and his obituary.

William A. Lewis passed away on February 24, 2022, at the age of 90. He was a member of the MAA for 40 years, and a brief obituary is available.

Evelyn Wantland passed away on February 4, 2022, at the age of 104. She was a member of the MAA for 72 years! Wantland held emeritus status at Illinois Wesleyan University, retiring in 1976. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Charles Traina passed away in January 2022, at the age of 71. He was a Professor of Mathematics at St. John’s University (NY) and a member of the MAA for 51 years. His research interests were group theory and measure theory, and he wrote several book reviews for the MAA.

John Selden passed away on January 8, 2022, at the age of 87. He was a life member of the MAA, holding membership for 61 years. Selden taught mathematics at many universities, including the University of Kentucky, Bayero University (Nigeria) where he served as Head of Department and Dean of Science, and Tennessee Technological University. John Selden was known for his expertise and interest in undergraduate mathematics education, in collaboration with his wife Annie Selden. In 2004, the MAA Board of Governors approved the MAA's Annie and John Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education “to honor individuals with a significant record of published research in mathematics education in the first 10 years of their careers in mathematics education”. John Selden was active with the MAA SIGMAA on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, and he served on the MAA’s Committee on the Profession and the College Mathematics Journal board. More information about his life and career can be found in this brief profile from the MAA and his obituary.

2021

Jean-Claude Evard passed away on December, 2021, at the age of 79. During his career, he taught at Western Kentucky University and a member of the MAA for 32 years. Evard’s passing was noted in local media due to his fame as Bowling Green (KY)’s “Running Man”.

Richard F. Messalle passed away on December 19, 2021, at the age of 79. He was a member of the MAA for 56 years and a career civil servant working for the US Navy at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Potomac MD. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Nicholas R. Baeth, professor of mathematics passed away on December 11, 2021, at the age of 43, after a brief struggle with cancer. He was a professor at the University of Central Missouri for 13 years and then at Franklin & Marshall College for 3½ years. Baeth was a member of the MAA for 25 years. His passion was teaching and doing research with undergraduates, and he was a specialist in algebra. Baeth was a member of the 2005 class for Project NExT, and served on the Merten M. Haase Prize committee. More information about his life and work can be found in his department’s memorial statement, these remembrances, and his obituary.

John Wetzel passed away on November 29, 2021, at the age of 89. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois. A generous supporter of the MAA, a member of the Icosahedron Society, and a member of the MAA for 69 years! Wetzel received two MAA awards for expository writing (shared with co-authors): the Ford Prize in 2005 and the Pólya Prize in 2007. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from the University of Illinois and his obituary.

Shirley McBay passed away on November 27, 2021 at the age of 86. McBay’s career included fifteen years at Spelman College as a faculty member and administrator, five years with the National Science Foundation, and ten years as the dean of student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In all of these roles, she was known as a “trailblazing Black mathematician [who] fought to bring more students from underrepresented groups into science and engineering fields”, as described in MIT News. After her work at MIT, McBay founded and was president of the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network, until she retired in 2016. She was also the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, and after her passing, the University of Georgia's Science Library was renamed after her. Substantial more information about her life and career can be found in a retrospective from the University of Georgia, a tribute from Spelman College, and her Wikipedia page.

Robert Kaplan passed away on November 11, 2021, at the age of 88. Kaplan, who taught at Harvard, was a member of the MAA for 26 years. He and his wife Ellen are best known for pioneering The Math Circle in the United States in the 1990’s, co-curricular workshops featuring open-ended, problem-based mathematics that students deeply explore together. (A sample video is available.) Robert and Ellen Kaplan were the authors of several well-received books in mathematics education, including The Art of the Infinite and Out of the Labyrinth. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from Prof. Oliver Knill, a tribute by Instituto TIM (Brazil), a 2003 interview in The Guardian, and a 2001 interview in Cabinet.

Merrilee Helmers passed away in November 2021, at the age of 75. She was an Emerita Professor at California State University, Fresno, retiring in 2007. Helmers was a member of the MAA for 37 years.

Arthur Mattuck passed away on October 8, 2021, at the age of 91. He was emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (retiring in 2010). Mattuck was a member of the MAA for 71 years, starting in 1950! A specialist in algebraic geometry, Mattuck devoted the latter half of his career to the undergraduate program at MIT, including the design of their calculus sequence. More information about his life and career can be found in an article from MIT News and his obituary.

Franklin (Frank) Demana passed away on September 29, 2021, at the age of 82. He was professor emeritus at The Ohio State University and a member of the MAA for 37 years. In a lifetime achievement award given to Demana in 2015, the citation from the NCTM described his “profound effect on mathematics instruction on both a national and an international level,” for the textbooks written by him and his colleague and friend Bert Waits. Demana and Waits were on the vanguard of using graphing calculators and computers in the teaching and learning of high school and college mathematics. Demana was a founder of Teachers Teaching with Technology (T3), which is now a worldwide community. More information about Demana’s life and career can be found in this NCTM biography with Bert Waits, and his obituary.

Charles Cable passed away on September 16, 2021, at the age of 89. He was a Professor Emeritus at Allegheny College after he retired in 1996, and a member of the MAA for 60 years. Cable led the mathematics department at Allegheny College for twenty years, and he was known as an expert in graph theory. In 2005, he received the Meritorious Service award from the Allegheny Mountain Section of the MAA. This service included serving terms as Chairman, and also Governor, of the Allegheny Mountain Section, serving as an Associate Editor of MAA FOCUS, and instituting a session at the annual Section meeting for undergraduate students to present research talks. He was also a key leader in establishing student chapters of the MAA. Further information about his life and career can be found in his obituary, posted by Allegheny College.

Gerald (Jerry) Heuer passed away on September 14, 2021, at the age of 91. At Concordia College (Minnesota), he was Professor Emeritus and Mathematician in Residence from 1995 until his death. Heuer was a member of the MAA for 66 years and had a strong interest in mathematics competitions. From 1998-1990, he was director of the training session for the USA Team in the International Mathematical Olympiad, as well as leader of the IMO’s USA delegation. Heuer also served on the Questions Committee for the Putnam Competition and as a grader. Since retirement, he has created problems for regional intercollegiate mathematical competitions, including the MAA North Central Section Team Competition, now named after him. For information about Heuer’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

John Driscoll passed away on September 16, 2021, at the age of 85. He was a professor at Marymount Manhattan College until he retired, and a member of the MAA for 21 years. Driscoll, photographed teaching in 1967 and then in the early 1970’s, was also a Woodrow Wilson fellow at the University of Chicago. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Elaine Ann Kasimatis passed away on September 7, 2021, at the age of 69. When she died, she was an active faculty member at CSU Sacramento, working there for over 30 years. Kasimatis was a member of the MAA for 36 years. An expert in mathematics education, Kasimatis was one of the three co-creators of the innovative “College Preparatory Mathematics: Change from Within” program. In 2021, she was awarded the MAA’s Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Carlton J. Maxson passed away on September 1, 2021, at the age of 85. He was a member of the MAA for 60 years and retired with Emeritus status from Texas A&M University in 2002. Maxson wrote a remembrance of being a student of Dov Tamari at SUNY-Buffalo, and more information about Maxson’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Stephen B. Maurer passed away on August 25, 2021, ten days past his 75th birthday. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at his alma mater, Swarthmore College since 2017 after teaching there since 1979. Maurer was a member of the MAA for 54 years and his involvement with the MAA included chairmanship of the MAA Committee on the American Mathematical Competitions (1981-87), co-chair of the MAA Notes Editorial Board, member of the Committee on Books and the Classroom Resource Materials Editorial Board. Maurer was an outstanding educator; for his contributions to the field of education he was given the Presidential Award by the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges in 1985. He was also an advocate of good writing in Mathematics; for his expository writing he received the Allendoerfer Award of the MAA in 1981. More information about his life and career can be found in a the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges in 1985. He was also an advocate of good writing in Mathematics; for his expository writing he received the Allendoerfer Award of the MAA in 1981. More information about his life and career can be found in a from Swarthmore College and an obituary.

Charles J. Stuth passed away on August 23, 2021, at the age of 89. He was a member of the MAA for 66 years! Stuth retired from Stephens College (Missouri) in 1995. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Genevieve M. Knight passed away on August 19, 2021 at the age of 82. Knight was nationally known for her work as a mathematics educator at historically Black colleges and universities. She taught for several years at Hampton University (Virginia) and continued her career at Coppin State University. Knight was presented with the Outstanding Faculty Award for Mathematics and Mentoring of Minority Youth from the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. In 1996, she was named the Wilson H. Elkins distinguished professor for the University of Maryland System. Knight was an emeritus faculty at Coppin State University and a member of the MAA for 60 years. During her career, she served on several MAA committees, including the Committee on the Participation of Women and the Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics. For much more information about her life and career, see the citation from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, her Wikipedia page, biographical information on the MAA website, a video of her memorial service, reflections published in MAA FOCUS, and her obituary in the Baltimore Sun.

Carole Lacampagne passed away on August 5, 2021, at the age of 87. She was a member of the MAA for 37 years. Lacampagne taught at Northern Illinois University and George Washington University, and for the U.S. Department of Education, she was the Director of the National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning. She also served as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Academies of Science. Lacampagne was very active in the MAA, including serving as the first Tensor Summa director from 2007 to 2012, and on several committees. More information about her career can be found on her Wikipedia page.

Eliot Tanis passed away on July 22, 2021, at the age of 87. He was an emeritus professor at Hope College (Michigan) and a member of the MAA for 56 years. A specialist in statistics, he was the co-author of the textbook Probability and Statistical Inference. For the MAA, he served the Michigan Section as chairperson (1976-77) and section governor (1989-92). He received a teaching award in 1992 and a distinguished service award in 1996 from the Michigan section. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from Hope College.

Patrick J. Leonard passed away on July 17, 2021. He was a life member of the MAA, maintaining membership for 73 years! Leonard was a mathematician and physicist for the U.S. Department of Defense for over 40 years, including work as a mathematician for the U.S. Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force Cambridge Research Center, and Watertown Arsenal. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Carol Ulsafer passed away on July 16, 2021, at the age of 80. She was a tenured faculty member at North Central College (IL), but taught at the University of Montana for over a decade before she retired. Ulsafer was a member of the MAA for 53 years. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Thomas P. Kilkelly passed away on July 6, 2021, at the age of 73. He was a high school mathematics teacher, primarily at St. Thomas Academy and Wayzata High School, in Minnesota. A member of the MAA for 18 years, Kilkelly served three years on the MAA Board of Governors as Governor-at-Large for High School Teachers. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Carol Crawford passed away on July 1, 2021, at the age of 69. After nearly 30 years at the Naval Academy (Annapolis), she was named Professor Emerita, achieving the rank of Full Professor of Mathematics. Crawford was a member of the MAA for 33 years and served as an Associate Editor for the American Mathematical Monthly. She was known for her research in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision and was selected as a Fellow of the Institute for Combinatorics, Winnipeg, Canada. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Thomas Wysmuller passed away on June 29, 2021, at the age of 77. He was a member of the MAA for 38 years. A meteorologist by training, Wysmuller worked for the Royal Dutch Weather Bureau, NASA, Pratt & Whitney, and a variety of insurance companies. He also gave lectures worldwide on his conservative analysis of climate change. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from his family, a profile from “DeSmog”, and his obituary.

Elinor Evenchick Berger passed away on June 5, 2021, at the age of 78. She was a Professor of Mathematics at Columbus State University until she retired in 2000 and a member of the MAA for 62 years. More information about Berger’s life and career can be found in her obituary.

Jack Pollin Jack Pollin passed away on May 26, 2021, at the age of 99. He was a member of the MAA for 52 years. Pollin served the US Army throughout his life, and as a Professor of Mathematics, he was Head of the Mathematics Department at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, for 11 years. More information about his life and career can be found in an article about his granddaughter graduating from West Point, related photographs, and his obituary.

Andrew Sterrett passed away on May 22, 2021, at the age of 97. He was a member of the MAA for 72 years! Sterrett, Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences at Denison University, was very active in the MAA, including service as interim associate director for publications. In 1989, he received the MAA’s Meritorious Service Award. Sterrett was the editor of two well-known books: Using Writing to Teach Mathematics and multiple editions of 101 Careers in Mathematics. He was also a member of the MAA’s Icosahedron Society, for his extraordinary generosity, and a room is named after him at the MAA headquarters in Washington, DC. More information about Sterrett’s life and career can be found in an article describing his receipt of the French Legion d’Honneur award, a feature article from Denison University, and his obituary.

Marion Walter passed away on May 9, 2021, at the age of 92. She was Professor Emerita of Mathematics at the University of Oregon. Walter was a member of the MAA for 65 years! She was respected internationally as an expert in preparing prospective elementary school teachers to teach mathematics, and was the author of several books including The Art of Problem Posing (with Stephen Brown) and The Magic Mirror Book, which teaches children about symmetry. In addition, she is known for “The Marion Walter Theorem”, or “Marion’s Theorem” deals with the area of hexagon under certain conditions. Walter’s photographs of American mathematicians are available at the Briscoe Center for American History. More information about her life and career can be found in a remembrance from the University of Oregon, reflections from the president of Simmons University, a rememberance from the AWM, her Wikipedia page, and her obituary.

Edward P. Merkes passed away on April 25, 2021, at the age of 92. He was a member of the MAA for 72 years! A specialist in analysis, Merkes was an emeritus professor at the University of Cincinnati and served on the MAA Classroom Recources Editorial Board. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Roseanne M. Ferdico passed away on April 17, 2021, at the age of 71. An MAA member of 38 years, Ferdico was an information technology specialist in the at New York Harbor Healthcare System until she retired. Remembrances are published with her obituary.

Robert Michael “Mike” Nelson, passed away on Wednesday, March 24, 2021, at the age of 79. An alumnus of Wesleyan College in West Virginia, he worked for the United States Postal Service, and he was a member of the MAA for 44 years. Information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Heinrich Guggenheimer passed away on March 4, 2021, at the age of 96. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the MAA for 59 years. Guggenheimer contributed to research in differential geometry, topology, and algebraic geometry, and he was also an expert on Jewish sacred literature. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance by Jerold Levoritz, and Guggenheimer’s Wikipedia page.

Eleanor Green Dawley Jones passed away on March 1, 2021, at the age of 91. She was Professor Emerita at Norfolk State University (Virginia) and a member of the MAA for 67 years. Jones was one of the first African-American women to achieve a Ph.D. in mathematics, and she served on the AWM Executive Committee for several years in the 1990’s. She also received the National Association of Mathematicians Distinguished Service Award after serving as its vice president. For the MAA, Jones was a member of the Board of Governors from 1989-94. For more information about her life and career, see an extensive piece in the AWM Newsletter, and also her obituary.

Nathaniel Dean passed away on February 19, 2021, at the age of 65. During his career, after working several years for Bell Labs, he was a professor at Rice University, Texas Southern University and Texas State University, retiring from TSU in 2016. Dean was a member of the MAA for 13 years, serving on the Board of Governors, the Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics, the College Mathematics Journal Editorial Board, and other committees. He served as President of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) and he received NAM’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Dean was an expert graph theory, graph algorithms, parallel computing, and data visualization. More information about his career can be found on his Mathematically Gifted and Black page and on his Wikipedia page.

Isadore Singer, passed away on February 11, 2021, at the age of 96. A member of the MAA for 46 years, Singer was an Emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Singer, a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley, was well-known for his seminal work at the intersections of analysis, topology, differential equations, and physics, leading to results such as the famous Atiyah–Singer index theorem. He was the recipient of many awards, including the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the National Medal of Science and the Abel Prize. More information about his life and career can be found in a news release from MIT, an obituary in the New York Times, a remembrance from John Baez, and his Wikipedia page.

Sidney Kung passed away on February 6, 2021, at the age of 89. He was a professor at Jacksonville University and a member of the MAA for 52 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Mary F. Neff passed away on February 3, 2021, at the age of 91. She was Professor Emeritus at Emory University and a member of the MAA for 39 years. Earlier in her career, Neff was the first woman faculty member in the Mathematics Department at John Carroll University. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Lida K. Barrett, past MAA President, passed away on January 28, 2021, at the age of 93. She was a faculty member and senior administrator at several universities, including Mississippi State University, where she was Dean of Arts and Sciences. Barrett was a member of the MAA for 66 years and served as President 1989-1990. In 2008, she received the MAA’s Gung and Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics to recognize her contributions, including serving on the MAA’s Audit and Budget Committee for five years, initiating and enhancing programs to promote the interest of under-represented groups, promoting a stronger focus on K-12 mathematics and science education by the National Science Foundation, and serving as the MAA’s second female President. She was also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Women in Mathematics. Extensive information about her life and career can be found in her Gung and Hu citation, a 2006 interview with Kenneth Ross, a remembrance published in MAA FOCUS, and her obituary (written by her daughter).

John Alden Thorpe passed away on January 18, 2021, at the age of 84. He was a member of the MAA for 66 years. An author of books on elemental topology and geometry, differential geometry, and linear algebra, Thorpe held faculty positions during his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Haverford College and SUNY-Stony Brook. He was a dean at SUNY-Buffalo and provost of Queens College (CUNY), and Thorpe was a director at the National Science Foundation. The final role in his career was executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Wilbur Lee Smith one of the first Black Ph.D’s in mathematics in the United States, passed away on January 23, 2021, at the age of 79. Smith was a long-time professor and chair of the mathematics department at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He was a member of the MAA for 53 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Michael Botsko passed away on January 3, 2021, at the age of 77. He was a professor of mathematics at St. Vincent College (PA) for 50 years and a member of the MAA for 36 years. Botsko was the author of a textbook on real analysis. Photos from his retirement party from St. Vincent are available, as well as a brief obituary.

Hubert (Hugh) Chrestenson passed away on January 2, 2021, at the age of 93. He was a member of the MAA for 71 years! Chrestenson was a Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Reed College, following his retirement in 1990. He was best known for his work on Walsh functions. Some of his children and grandchildren followed him into the mathematics profession. More information about his life and career, including memories from students, can be found on his obituary page.

>Robert H. Thompson passed away on January 10, 2021, at the age of 96. He was a member of the MAA for 73 years! Thompson was a Professor of Mathematics at Sterling College from 1947-1967 and at Washburn University (Kansas) from 1967-1989, where he was an emeritus associate professor. He served as secretary and treasurer for the Kansas section of the Mathematical Association of America. More information about his life and career can be found in an announcement of a scholarship in his name, and his obituary.

Robert B. McFadden passed away in 2021, at the age of 86. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Louisville and a member of the MAA for 60 years. During his career, McFadden also taught at Queen’s University Belfast and Northern Illinois University, and he served as president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. More information about his life can be found in a feature story about McFadden and his wife.

2020

Stanley Eisenstat passed away on December 17, 2020, at the age of 76. At his passing, he was a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and a member of the MAA for 57 years. His research focus included numerical linear and nonlinear algebra, direct and iterative methods for solving sparse linear systems, and parallel computing. Eisenstat was well-known at Yale for his devotion to students. More information about his life and career can be found in an article in the Yale Daily News, another article for Yale alumni, an obituary from SIAM, and a page for students and colleagues to share memories.

Jerry Alexanderson passed away on December 16, 2020, at the age of 87. A professor emeritus at Santa Clara University, Alexanderson was a long-time leader of the MAA, including serving a year as the MAA President in 1997-98. He was an MAA member for 65 years, and in that time, he also served as First Vice President (1984-1986), Secretary (1990-1997), and as a member of the Board of Governors for 24 years. In 2005, he was honored with both the MAA Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics and the MAA Gung and Hu Distinguished Service to Mathematics Award. Alexanderson was a prolific author, and served as the Editor of MAA’s Mathematics Magazine for four years. At Santa Clara University, he was known for his leadership, including 35 years as department chair, nine years as Division Director of Physical Sciences and Mathematics, director of the Honors Program. He was the Michael and Elizabeth Valeriote Professor from 1979 to 2016. In addition, the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) has an annual award in his name. For much more information about Alexanderson’s life and career, start with the obituary published by the MAA, and then read a 1997 interview in MAA FOCUS.

Sr. Miriam Cooney passed away on December 16, 2020, at the age of 95. She was a professor of mathematics at Saint Mary’s College (Indiana) for more than 40 years. She was also a member of the MAA for 71 years! Sister Miriam was known for her passion to raise awareness of women’s contributions and leadership in mathematics and science. For example, as noted in a remembrance from Saint Mary’s College, she was the co-author of a study of Catholic women who held doctorate degrees and had careers in mathematics. Significant information about her life and career can also be found in a reflection from the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

Paul Saylor passed away on November 7, 2020, at the age of 81. A mathematician by training, he was Professor Emeritus in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a member of the MAA for 20 years. Saylor was known for his work in numerical solutions to differential equations and his collaborations with scientists in aeronautics, hydrology, and physics. More information about Saylor’s life and career can be found on a remembrance site and his obituary.

Seymour (Sy) Schuster passed away on October 31, 2020, at the age of 94, after testing positive for COVID-19. He was the Laird Professor of Mathematics and the Liberal Arts, Emeritus, at Carleton College (retired in 1994). He was also a life member of the MAA, maintaining his membership for 72 years! Schuster is considered one of the fathers of mathematics research by undergraduates, as he co-convened a conference at Carleton in 1961 with Kenneth O. May. He also created the College Geometry Project in the 1960’s, which included well-received instructional videos for teachers. More information about Schuster’s life and career can be found in a remembrance from Carleton College an extensive memorial site, and his obituary.

Alan E. Rufty passed away on September 10, 2020, at the age of 73. He was a member of the MAA for 31 years. Rufty worked for the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, and over the years published several research papers in mathematical physics. He was also a talented chess player. Some information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Janet Liou-Mark passed away on September 6, 2020, at the age of 54. She was a Professor of Mathematics at New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York for 22 years and a member of the MAA for six years. An expert in mathematics education, Liou-Mark was a founding member of the Peer-Led Team Learning International Society (PLTIS) which fosters learning through peer-led teams. In 2014, she was the recipient of the MAA’s Metropolitan New York Section 2014 Award for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics and the 2019 Award for Distinguished Service from the section. Liou-Mark was the Chair of the Metropolitan New York Section of the MAA from 2018 to August 2020. More information about Liou-Mark’s career can be found in this remembrance from the PLTIS and her faculty profile.

Ranjan Roy died unexpectedly on August 12, 2020, at the age of 73. He was the Huffer Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Beloit College, posthumously promoted to emeritus status after his passing. Roy was known for his expertise in differential equations, fluid mechanics, special functions, Fuchsian groups, and the history of mathematics. He was a member of the MAA for 31 years, and the recipient of several MAA awards: the teaching award from the Wisconsin Section, the 2003 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for excellence in teaching, and the 1991 Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for the expository article “The Discovery of the Series Formula for π”. More information about his life and career can be found in “A Teacher Who Transformed Lives” from Beloit College, a remembrance also published by Beloit College, and his obituary.

Herbert Taylor passed away on July 19, 2020, at the age of 92. He was a member of the MAA for 51 years.

Harold Don Allen passed away on July 11, 2020, at the age of 89. He was a member of the MAA for 52 years. With a doctorate in mathematics education, he taught professionally for 51 years (retiring in 1987) as a high school teacher in greater Montreal and remote Quebec, and as a professor of mathematics education at the Nova Scotia Teachers College in Truro. Allen was well-known for his contributions to McGill University’s Summer School for the Gifted and Ottawa’s Bright Math Camps in the 1990s, as well as work educating the Canadian public in the 1970’s about the merits of the metric system. He was also active in numismatic societies, bringing a “story-teller’s passion to curation of numismatic history”, including his use of television. More information about Allen’s life and career can be found in a remembrance from McGill, this commentary, and his obituary.

Peter Duren passed away on July 10, 2020, at the age of 85. He was a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a member of the MAA for 62 years. Duren was an expert in complex analysis, publishing several books in the field, including Invitation to Classical Analysis. He served on the editorial board of the American Mathematical Monthly from 1996 to 2001, and Duren was the son of past MAA president William L. Duren Jr. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Ronald (Ron) Graham passed away on July 6, 2020, at the age of 84. He was a former president of the MAA (2003-04) and a life member, maintaining his membership for 64 years. Graham was a central figure for over half a century in the development of discrete mathematics, making seminal contributions to scheduling theory, computational geometry, and other areas. He also popularized the concept of the ErdÅ‘s number. Graham received numerous awards from the MAA: the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award (1990) and the Lester R. Ford Award (1991), which are two MAA awards for articles of expository excellence, and the Euler Book Prize with Persi Diaconis for their book Magical Mathematics. An account of his many other honors from various societies can be found on his Wikipedia page. Graham was also a former president of the AMS (1993-94) and was honored with their Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement as a research mathematician. He was the former president of the International Jugglers Association, and during his career he developed new juggling routines utilizing concepts from discrete mathematics. Graham spent the primary part of his career at Bell Labs/AT&T Labs, and then joined the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) for several years. For more about Graham’s life and his work, start with the remembrance published in MAA Focus, an article from UCSD establishing an endowed chair in his name, a remembrance from UCSD, the Citation from the AMS, a follow-up article from the AMS, video tributes from the combinatorics community, and an article in The Guardian.

Enrico Federighi passed away on May 5, 2020, at the age of 92. He was a mathematician for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory retiring after 38 years of service, and a member of the MAA for 60 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

John H. Conway passed away of complications from COVID-19, on April 11, 2020, at the age of 82. Conway’s contributions to mathematics were wide and deep, as he made seminal contributions to combinatorial game theory, number theory, geometry, topology, algebra, and other areas. Among his well-known discoveries or inventions are the Conway group, his Game of Life, and surreal numbers. received numerous prizes, and to name a few: he was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society; he was awarded the AMS’ Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition; he was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Princeton University, Conway was the John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics until 2013, when he acquired emeritus status. To learn more about Conway’s life and his work, start with his Wikipedia page, (written by Siobhan Roberts), a remembrance from Princeton University, a reflection from Scientific American, and his obituary in The New York Times. There is also an xkcd tribute and a commentary with links to MAA articles from Don Albers. Conway and his work are featured on many MAA pages.

Cecil Rousseau passed away on April 10, 2020, at the age of 82. He was Emeritus Professor at the University of Memphis and a member of the MAA for 50 years. Known as C²R (“C-squared-R”) to students and colleagues, Rousseau played a major role in the establishment, growth, and success of the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad Team. He led the USA International Mathematical Olympiad delegation for several years in the 1980’s and 1990’s, including the 1986 team that tied the Soviet Union for first place. In 2012, Rousseau received the prestigious Paul Erdös Award, and he was ErdÅ‘s' 5th most common co-author, with 35 joint papers. Rousseau served as the Managing Editor for the Problems Section of SIAM Review. For the MAA, he served on the USAMO/USAJMO board for mathematics competitions, the College Mathematics Journal editorial board, and the Committee on Competitions. More information about Rousseau’s life and career can be found in this remembrance from the University of Memphis, an older U-M article and his obituary.

Carl E. Behrens, Jr. passed away on March 19, 2020, at the age of 87. He was an energy policy analyst with the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service from 1975 to 2014, and a member of the MAA for 18 years. Between 2008 and 2019, Behrens served two terms as Chair of the SIGMAA on the Philosophy of Mathematics, as well as two terms as its Program Director. Among a variety of talks and sessions at national meetings, he spoke on “What are mathematical objects: An empiricist hypothesis” in 2006. Behrens was the co-editor of Using the Philosophy of Mathematics in Teaching Undergraduate Mathematics, part of the MAA Notes series.

Harlan Koca passed away on March 10, 2020, at the age of 89. He was a professor emeritus at Washburn University in Topeka and a member of the MAA for 51 years. More information about his life and career, including comments from students, can be found in his obituary.

Richard K. Guy passed away on March 9, 2020, at the age of 103. He was emeritus professor at the University of Calgary and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Guy published more than 300 papers and 12 books in areas such as number theory, geometry, recreational mathematics, combinatorics, and graph theory. He is well-known as the co-author of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (with John Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp) and the author of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. A new book, The Unity of Combinatorics, written with Ezra (Bud) Brown, was published posthumously in the spring of 2020. A remembrance from the University of Calgary includes the following observation: “Though he was undoubtedly preeminent in his field, he strove to make mathematics accessible to all.” Guy was a lifetime member of the MAA and received the MAA’s Lester R. Ford Award in 1989 for his paper “The Strong Law of Small Numbers”. To learn more about Guy’s life and career, start with a commentary with links to MAA articles from Don Albers and tributes to Guy published in MAA FOCUS. The Canadian Climbing League also published tribute, as Guy was also an avid climber. Further information can be found in his obituary.

Walter O. Augenstein, Jr. . passed away on March 9, 2020, at the age of 68. He was a member of the MAA for 30 years, and a generous donor. Augenstein received his bachelor’s degree with Case Western Reserve and won honorable mention on the Putnam Examination. Further information is in his obituary.

Katherine Johnson passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. Johnson was the main character of the Hidden Figures book and movie which chronicled the successes of African-American women who were “human computers” at NASA during the “space race” of the 20th century. Johnson worked for NASA from 1952 to 1986 and was critical to the success of manned US space flights, especially the historical missions of the 1960’s. For NASA, she made the necessary calculations in orbital mechanics (e.g. trajectories, launch windows) for missions to succeed, and, as reported in the Washington Post, In 26 signed reports for the space agency, and in many more papers that bore others’ signatures on her work, she codified mathematical principles that remain at the core of human space travel.” Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2015. Significantly more information about her life and career can be found in an article in an NPR article, an article in the Philadelphia Tribune, and her obituary.

Otis B. McCowan passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 85. He was a professor emeritus of mathematics at Belmont University and a member of the MAA for 55 years. He was remembered as an excellent professor and a supporter of Belmont athletics. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

William Coles passed away on February 16, 2020, at the age of 90. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah and a member of the MAA for 59 years. His research interests focused on the oscillatory properties of solutions to ordinary differential equations. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from his department, and his obituary.

B. Melvin Kiernan passed away on January 15, 2020, at the age of 83. He was professor emeritus at St. Peter’s University (NJ) and a member of the MAA for 62 years. A video interview with Kiernan is available in two parts, and more information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jean L. Conroy passed away in January 2020, at the age of 85. She was an Associate Professor Emerita at California State University, Long Beach. She was also a life member of the MAA, maintaining her membership for 66 years! More information about her life and career can be found in this article from the University of Maine.

Reuben Hersh passed away on January 3, 2020, at the age of 92. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Hersh was best known for his work in the history and philosophy of mathematics, and Hersh and Philp J. Davis won the National Book Award in 1983 for The Mathematical Experience. They also co-authored Descartes’ Dream: The World According to Mathematics. Hersh was also the recipient of the MAA’s Chauvenet Prize in 1975 (with Martin Davis) for an article in Scientific American, as well as the MAA’s Lester R. Ford Award in 1994 (with Edgar Lorch). Hersh served on the College Mathematics Journal board for many years. More information about his life and career can be found in a tribute from the Santa Fe Institute, and his obituary.

2019

Ramendra Bhattacharyya was a member of the MAA for 53 years, and his death was reported to the MAA in 2019. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University and was an emeritus Associate Professor of Mathematics at Pacific University in Oregon.

Sylvia M. Svitak passed away in 2019. She taught at Queensborough Community College (CUNY), and she was a life member of the MAA, maintaining membership for 18 years. Svitak is included in a group photograph from the 2014 Numeracy Infusion Course for Higher Education (NICHE).

Karen D. King passed away on December 24, 2019, at the age of 48. King was the program director in NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate for several years, and previously taught at San Diego State University, Michigan State University, and New York University. She was a member of the MAA for 19 years. She also served as Director of Research for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. King was the AWM-MAA Etta Zuber Falconer Lecturer in 2012. Many remembrances of King’s life can be found on this tribute page.

William Boyce passed away on November 4, 2019, at the age of 88. He was a professor emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Boyce is known for his widely-used textbook, written with Richard C. DiPrima, Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems, currently in its 11th edition. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

John R. Alexander passed away on October 27, 2019, at the age of 84. He was Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the MAA for 54 years. Alexander was a life member of the MAA. His main research interests were integral geometry and convexity theory. More information about Alexander’s life and career can be found in a remembrance from Illinois and his obituary.

James A. Donaldson passed away on October 18, 2019, at the age of 78. He was Professor Emeritus at Howard University and a member of the MAA for 54 years. He was on the faculty at Howard University for 45 years, including serving as chairman of the mathematics department for 18 years then as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for over 12 years. Donaldson played vital role in the development of Howard’s Ph.D. program, which was the first doctoral program in mathematics at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). For the MAA, he served on committees focusing on minority participation and in Carriage House programming. Video interviews with Donaldson are included in the HistoryMakers archives, and more information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from Howard University, a remembrance from the University of Illinois, and his obituary.

John Tate passed away on October 16, 2019, at the age of 94. Tate was on the faculty at Harvard University for 36 years and the University of Texas as Austin for 19 years, receiving emeritus honors from both institutions. He was also a member of the MAA for 49 years. In 2010, Tate received one of the highest honors in mathematics, the Abel Prize, for his seminal work in number theory. He also received the American Mathematical Society’s Cole Prize in Number Theory in 1956 and its Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 1995. In 2002-03, he shared the Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Mikio Sato. Significant more information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from the University of Texas, a 2011 interview with Tate in the AMS Notices, a post from Peter Woit, Tate’s New York Times obituary, and his Wikipedia page.

James (Jim) D. Gates passed away on October 10, 2019, at the age of 92. He served as the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) for 31 years. He was a member of the MAA for 65 years! Gates led the NCTM as it developed the original NCTM Standards in the late 1980’s, and received the Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. For the MAA, he served on the Committee for the Mathematical Education of Teachers. More information about his life and career can be found at the NCTM web site and his obituary.

Richard (Dick) Askey passed away on October 9, 2019, at the age of 86. He was professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin following his retirement in 2003, and a member of the MAA for 68 years. Askey was known as the foremost authority on special functions such as the Askey–Wilson polynomials. He was also an expert in the mathematics of Srinivasa Ramanujan, leading to being named an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Mathematical Society. Askey was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society. In 1999 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. For the MAA, Askey participated in several sessions that MAA organized through the Preparing Mathematicians to Educate Teachers project during the mid-2000's. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance by David Bressoud and Askey’s obituary.

Upadhyayulu V. Satyanarayana passed away in September, 2019, at the age of 84. He was an emeritus professor at California State University, Northridge. Satyanarayana was a life member of the MAA, with continuous membership for 41 years.

Dilip K. Datta passed away on September 26, 2019, at the age of 80. He was a life member of the MAA, maintaining membership for 35 years. Datta was professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, after retiring in 2006. He was known for his book Math Education at its Best: The Potsdam Model, and an extensive quote from the book was included in the citation of Clarence F. Stephens (of SUNY-Potsdam) for the 2003 MAA Gung-Hu award for distinguished service to mathematics. Datta also published Transforming Math Anxiety to Math Agility in 2019. More information about Datta’s life and career can be found in an article published in India and his obituary.

Helen Hoffman passed away on September 14, 2019, at the age of 87. She had a distinguished career teaching Math, Science, and Chemistry in Phoenix, Arizona, and was a member of the MAA for 61 years. Hoffman also taught at Ottawa University in Phoenix. More information about her life can be found in her obituary.

Richard Van Slyke passed away on August 30, 2019. He was a Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at New York University (NYU)’s Tandon School of Engineering and a member of the MAA for 44 years. Van Slyke was the first director of NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and was one of the founders of the Network Analysis Corporation. More information about his career can be found in a remembrance published by NYU.

Colin Blyth passed away on August 22, 2019, at the age of 96. He was a member of the MAA for 48 years. Blyth was a professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) from 1950 until 1974 and then continued his career at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario until his retirement in 1987. Blyth’s work as a statistician emerges in a number of places, including the Freakonomics blog, an appearance in the MAA’s “Who’s That Mathematician”, and as the scribe for a well-known book of lecture notes of Eric Lehmann. Blyth is remembered in this brief obituary.

Marilyn Zweng passed away on August 13, 2019, at the age of 87. She was professor emerita in mathematics education at the University of Iowa and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Zweng was an editor for the NCTM yearbook series in the 1970’s and 1980’s, such as the 1986 Yearbook on Estimation and Mental Computation. As a graduate student, she gained wide recognition in the Wisconsin mathematics teaching community as the host of a Wisconsin Public Television show called “Mathematics with Marilyn”. More information about her life and career can be found in this description of a memorial fund and her obituary.

Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a groundbreaking mathematical physicist who was a pioneer in the discipline of chaos theory, passed away on June 30, 2019, at the age of 74. Feigenbaum was the Toyota Professor and director of the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University. He is perhaps best known for his research on period-doubling bifurcations, leading a universal constant 4.6692… known today as the first Feigenbaum constant. He also invented new fractal geometry methods for cartography. Feigenbaum was a MacArthur Fellow and he was awarded the Wolf Prize in physics. Extensive information about Feigenbaum’s life and career can be found in The Washington Post, the MacTutor History of Math archive, and a remembrance from Rockefeller University.

David Sherry passed away on June 6, 2019, at the age of 79. He received emeritus honors at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, after teaching there for 36 years and serving as Mathematics Department Chair for over 10 years. Sherry was a member of the MAA for 40 years, and he was very active in the Florida Section. He served as the section's Governor from 1989-1992 and held positions within the section as both President and Vice-President for 4-year colleges. Sherry was awarded the Section's Distinguished Service Award in 1996. More information about Sherry’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Mary Beaumont passed away on June 11, 2019, at the age of 86. She was a member of the MAA for 62 years. During her career, Beaumont taught mathematics at Ripon College, Carroll College, and at high schools in Michigan and Wisconsin. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Patricia (Pat) Lanusse Jones passed away on May 24, 2019, at the age of 84. She taught at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and was a long-time member of the MAA. Jones was a creative champion in the training of K-12 mathematics teachers in Louisiana, leading the redesign of mathematics education courses at her institution, writing textbooks for those courses, and speaking at a variety of professional meetings. For the MAA, Jones was on the writing team for A Call for Change, published by the the MAA's Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (COMET) in 1991. That report influenced the content and methods of mathematics courses taken by prospective teachers in college. In 1996, she was awarded the distinguished teaching award from Louisiana-Mississippi section of the MAA. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Eugene “Gene” Nichols passed away on May 2, 2019, at the age of 96. He was a professor of mathematics education at Florida State University until 1990 and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Nichols was known for building the mathematics education program at Florida State while serving as department head, as well as establishing a summer program in the late 1950’s for talented high school students supported by grants from the NSF. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Elwyn Berlekamp passed away on April 9, 2019, at the age of 78. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the MAA for 53 years. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1961 as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1966 to 1971 he worked at Bell Labs, and the rest of his career was spent on the faculty at Berkeley. Berlekamp was known for his outstanding work in game theory, cryptography, and error correcting codes. Along with John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, he authored the multi-volume set Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays in 1982, which laid the foundations for combinatorial game theory and included analyses of dots and boxes, as well as Go. In the 1980’s, he founded a company Cyclotomics, whose encoders and “Berlekamp decoders” became the standard for space communications used by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Berlekamp also successfully led a hedge fund for several years, applying complex mathematics to achieve outsized returns. A close friend of Martin Gardner, he was one of the founders of Gathering 4 Gardner and was on its board for many years. Berlekamp was also a key figure in the establishment of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). Among his awards, he received the Claude E. Shannon Award from the IEEE in 1993. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. He supported the MAA as a generous donor towards the new "Martin Gardner lecture at MathFest. Significantly more information about his life and career can be found in an article from Berkeley, a tribute page at Gathering 4 Gardner, and his Wikipedia page.

George L. Lamb passed away on March 20, 2019. He was a member of the MAA for four years. In his career, he was a staff member at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, a researcher at United Aircraft Research Laboratories, and a professor of mathematics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Pam Crawford passed away suddenly on March 17, 2019, at the age of 63. She was on the faculty of Jacksonville University for 20 years, including her service as department chair. Crawford was a member of the MAA for 33 years, and contributed in many ways including representing Florida in the MAA Congress and serving on the Committee on SIGMAAs. She received the 2018 Distinguished Service Award from the Florida Section of the MAA as well as the 2015-16 Professor of the Year Award from Jacksonville University. A scholarship in Crawford’s name at Jacksonville University for mathematics students has been established. For more information about her life and career can be found in this remembrance posted at Jacksonville University, and her obituary.

Gilbert M. Helmberg passed away on February 18, 2019, at the age of 90. He was a professor at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and a member of the MAA for 22 years. A German announcement of his passing is available.

Thomas R. Butts passed away on January 26, 2019, at the age of 75. He was professor emeritus of mathematics education at the University of Texas at Dallas and a member of the MAA for 53 years. Butts was known for his expertise in posing mathematical problems and teaching problem-solving strategies. Throughout his career, he wrote questions for local and national mathematics contests, including the MAA's American Mathematics Competitions. Since 2014, Butts was the co-author of Advanced Quantitative Reasoning: Mathematics for the World Around Us, and he published other books and articles on problem solving throughout his career. In addition, he was on one of the teams that developed classroom materials related to the television show NUMB3RS. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jean M. Calloway passed away on January 25, 2019, at the age of 95. He was the Olney Professor of Mathematics (emeritus) at Kalamazoo College from 1960-1991 and a member of the MAA for 54 years. Calloway contributed to the 1991 CUPM report on the undergraduate mathematics major, and he was awarded the Michigan MAA’s Distinguished Service Award in 1994. There is an undated photograph available from early in his career, and more information is available in his obituary.

Abraham Franck passed away on January 17, 2019, at the age of 100. He was a member of the MAA for 70 years! A specialist in error-correction codes and computer science, Franck taught at the University of Minnesota (where he received his Ph.D.) and Kansas State University. He worked for Engineering Research Associates of Sperry Rand and also Fabri-Tek. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Sir Michael Atiyah passed away on January 11, 2019, at the age of 89. Atiyah, described as “one of the greatest British mathematicians since Isaac Newton”, was an Honorary Professor at University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He made seminal contributions in geometry, topology, and theoretical physics. Atiyah received the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work in K-theory, particularly the famous Atiyah-Singer theorem. In 2004 he was awarded the Abel Prize jointly with Singer for their statement and proof of the theorem. He also held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the University of Oxford of the UK. Among his leadership roles, Atiyah was the President of the Royal Society for five years and founding director of the Isaac Newton Institute. To learn more about Atiyah’s life and career, start with his Wikipedia pageand this remembrance from the London Mathematical Society. Also, Atiyah is featured on many MAA pages, some which include photographs from his professional life.

2018

Richard B. Talmadge was a member of the MAA for 43 years, and his death was reported to the MAA in 2018. Born in 1924, he received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1951. Talmadge worked in the aerospace and computing industries. For IBM, he was one of the leaders of the COBOL Commercial Translator (COMTRAN) project. More information about Talmadge’s career can be found on page 70 of this IBM document.

David W. Henderson died on December 20, 2018, at the age of 79. He was professor emeritus at Cornell University and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Henderson was known for his research on geometric aspects of topology, as well as his passion for mathematics education. He was part of the core curriculum development team of the Algebra Project established by Robert Moses. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance posted at Cornell, and his obituary.

Steven and Joanna Wood Schot were strong supporters of the MAA. Steven passed away on December 13, 2018 at the age of 88, and Joanna passed away on February 8, 2019, at the age of 91. Steven was an emeritus professor at American University, retiring in 1995, and a member of the MAA for 50 years. He was a specialist in the history of mathematics, as well as boundary value problems. He was an invited speaker at an MAA Section Meeting in 1977. Joanna was a nuclear physicist as a civilian for the United States Navy for 37 years and was department head for the Numerical Fluid Dynamics Branch. She authored 18 professional publications based on her work. She also served as the Executive Director of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1994-95. Steven and Joanna were married for 62 years.

Joseph E. Houle passed away on December 8, 2018, at the age of 88. Houle was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Dean Emeritus of the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences of Pace University in New York. He was a member of the MAA for 65 years. Among his accomplishments, he was a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and served as Chair of the Mathematics Section. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

David E. Zitarelli passed away on December 2, 2018, at the age of 77. He was professor emeritus at Temple University and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Zitarelli was an authority in the history of mathematics, and the MAA will be publishing his A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada: Volume 1: 1492–1930 in 2019. Zitarelli also wrote a history of the MAA’s EPADEL section and served on the MAA’s Centennial History subcommitee and the Joint Committee on Archives. More information about his life and career can be found in an autobiographical sketch he posted to his Temple site, an article in Philadelphia Inquirer, and his obituary.

Perfecto Vazquez passed away November 9, 2018, at the age of 85. He was a member of the MAA for 31 years, and Monsignor in the Catholic Church. Msgr. Vasquez was the Brooklyn Diocese’s first Hispanic pastor, and he was a teacher of mathematics. More information about Msgr. Vasquez life and career can be found in this obituary.

Richard A. Moore passed away on October 20, 2018, at the age of 94. He was professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a member of the MAA for 53 years. At CMU, Moore led the department for several years, overseeing the development of the Doctor of Arts in Mathematics, a program designed to prepare teachers for the collegiate level. He also created a summer program on programming and problem solving for high achieving elementary-age students. More information about Moore’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Bernard Kolman passed away on October 11, 2018, at the age of 86. He was a professor at Drexel University and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Early in his career, Kolman was a principal mathematician at the UNIVAC Division of Sperry Rand Corporation, and from 1985 to 1987, Kolman was the President of the EPADEL Section of the Mathematical Association of America. He was the author of several textbooks in linear algebra and other topics. There are more details about his life in his obituary.

J Frederick Leetch passed away on October 9, 2018, at the age of 89. He was a life member of the MAA, joining in 1960. Leetch was professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary and in tributes from others.

Joseph Kist passed away in October 2018. He was Emeritus Professor at New Mexico State University and a member of the MAA for 53 years. Kist provided a generous donation to Project NExT in his estate.

Henry Sharp, Jr. passed away September 23, 2018, at the age of 94. He was a member of the MAA for 64 years. Sharp held mathematics professorships at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University for thirty years, followed by eight years as the Radford Chair of Mathematics at Washington and Lee University, where he also served as department head. He was an elected officer for the MAA and the American Association of University Professors, and a member of the American Mathematical Society. Sharp wrote or co-wrote a dozen research publications and five textbooks. In retirement, he tutored students in the mentorship programs of the Lexington and Rockbridge County public schools. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from Washington and Lee University and in his obituary.

Olive Leskow passed away on September 9, 2018, at the age of 99. She was a member of the MAA for 70 years! She was a mathematics teacher for 40 years in the Gary, Indiana public school system, retiring in 1984. Leskow published in The Mathematics Teacher and was active in NCTM and the Indiana CTM. Leskow was fondly remembered as a teacher at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, and more information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Stephen Carlson passed away on August 18, 2018, at the age of 71. He retired as a professor at Rose-Hulman University in 2012. Carlson was a topologist and the author of a text for undergraduates on the subject. He was an active member of the MAA for 28 years, serving in a variety of roles in the Indiana Section and the North Central section. At the national level, Carlson chaired the Committee on Sections and the Committee on SIGMAAs for several years each. He was a Visiting Mathematician at the Association headquarters during the 2004-2005 academic year. More information about his life and career can be found in this biographical sketch on the Indiana Section’s web site, the citation for his Section Distinguished Service Award, a statement on his induction into the Signature HealthCARE Hall of Fame, and his obituary.

David C. Lay passed away on August 12, 2018, at the age of 77. He was a professor at the University of Maryland and a member of the MAA for 35 years. Lay is best known for his well-known textbook Linear Algebra and Its Applications, In 1996, he was honored with the title “Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of the University of Maryland”. Lay also served several terms on the national board of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences. Further information about Lay’s life and career can be found in a remembrance from the University of Maryland and his extensive obituary.

Ward Bouwsma passed away on August 2, 2018, at the age of 83. He was an editor at Mathematical Reviews for several years, and also taught at Pennsylvania State University, Southern Illinois University, and the University of Michigan. Bouwsma was a member of the MAA for 17 years. More information about his life and career is available in his obituary.

Dirk A. Plummer passed away on July 21, 2018, at the age of 88. Plummer served his country in the US Army for over 30 years and was a lifetime member of the MAA. As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was on the staff of “The Tech” student newspaper. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Andrew Borden, Jr. passed away on July 19, 2018, at the age of 84. Borden served in the US Air Force for 24 years, retiring as a Colonel, and then taught mathematics in the Alamo College District and other colleges in Texas. He was a member of the MAA for 13 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Arnold Wedel passed away on June 30, 2018, at the age of 90. He was professor emeritus at Bethel College (Kansas) and a member of the MAA for 57 years. He served as chair and governor of the Kansas section of the MAA, earning the Meritorious Service Award in 1987. A room at the MAA headquarters in Washington, D.C., is named for him. More information about Wedel’s life and career can be found in this article from Bethel College and his obituary.

Robert Xeras passed away on June 19, 2018, at the age of 78. He was professor emeritus at Siena Heights University and a member of the MAA for 41 years. Xeras served 17 years as the Public Information Officer for the Michigan Section of the MAA. He also worked as a system analyst for 30 years at St. Joseph’s hospital in Ann Arbor, taught mathematics at Lawrence Tech Institute, and served in the Marine Corps Reserves. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

John William “Bill” Friel passed away on June 11, 2018, at the age of 81. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Dayton and a member of the MAA for more than 40 years. Friel was very active in the Ohio Section of the MAA, serving as its President, Secretary-Treasurer, and Treasurer. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary. Some photos from his life are also available.

Ivar Skakgold passed away on May 29, 2018, at the age of 92. He was professor emeritus at the University of Delaware and a member of the MAA for 45 years. He was also on the faculty of Northwestern University during his career. Stakgold was the author or co-author of several on the topic of boundary value problems. He was also a champion bridge player and served as the president of SIAM in 1989-90. More information about his life and career can be found in SIAM News, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

Peter Curran passed away on April 18, 2018, at the age of 92. Curran was a member of the MAA for 70 years! He was Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, after 49 years of service to the institution. His research specialties included algebra and cohomology. Curran left a strong legacy at Fordham, as reflected in comments provided by colleagues in a 2015 article, Fordham’s remembrance after his death, and tributes posted to his obituary page.

Mary Margaret Wood Longo passed away on March 29, 2018, at the age of 95. She was a professor emeritus at King’s College (PA) and a member of the MAA for 47 years. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Joseph Flaherty passed away on March 28, 2018, at the age of 74. He was Amos Eaton Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and a member of the MAA until his retirement in 2005. Flaherty was an applied mathematician and was crucial to the establishment of the Department of Computer Science at RPI. He also served as RPI’s Dean of the School of Science. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jeffrey Bergen passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 62. He was a member of the MAA for four years and a professor at DePaul University starting in 1981. Bergen was an internationally recognized scholar in the area of non-commutative algebra. An article published by DePaul in early March has a photograph of Bergen as well as his mathematical comments about “March Madness”. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Philip J. Davis passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 95. Davis was Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and a well-known writer for which he received many awards. The MAA awarded him the Paul R. Halmos - Lester R. Ford Award in 1982 for his article “Are There Coincidences in Mathematics” and the George Pólya Award in 1986 for his article “What Do I Know? A Study of Mathematical Self-Awareness”. In 1997, Davis received the JPBM Communications Award with this citation: “For being a prolific communicator of mathematics to the general public”. He is best known for The Mathematical Experience and Descartes' Dream, books which he co-authored with Reuben Hersch. Much more information about his life and career can be found in SIAM News, a biography from Brown University, an interview he gave in 2004, his obituary, and this page created by his son Ernest. Davis was a member of the MAA for 59 years.

Clarence Stephens passed away on March 5, 2018, at the age of 100. He was a member of the MAA for an extraordinary 77 years. Stephens was the ninth African American to receive a PhD in mathematics and is best known for leading the mathematics department at SUNY-Potsdam from 1969 until his retirement in 1987. As chair of the department, he played the leading role in “The Potsdam Miracle” – combining a welcoming atmosphere with a rigorous curriculum that led to a remarkable increase in the number of mathematics majors at that institution. For instance, in 1985, Potsdam graduated 184 mathematics majors, which was about a quarter of the degrees given there that year. For his leadership, Stephens was awarded the MAA’s Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service in 2003. Significantly more information about his life and career can be found in the citation for the 2003 award, an article published in 2017 in MAA FOCUS, a biography published by the National Association of Mathematicians, an article published at the University of Buffalo, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

Murray Gechtman passed away on February 28, 2018, at the age of 88. Gechtman taught math at Pierce College (Los Angeles) for more than 40 years and he was a member of the MAA for 57 years. According to his obituary: “He was a man of principle; he wrote several textbooks which were unapologetically difficult. His publishers asked him to ‘dumb them down’ but he refused.”

Herbert Wathan passed away on February 25, 2018, at the age of 91. Wathan was a member of the MAA for 47 years. He taught mathematics at Louisiana State University at Eunice and at the University of New Orleans before retiring in 1995. More information about Wathan’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Alan Baker passed away on February 4, 2018, at the age of 78. Baker was a number theorist who received a Fields Medal in 1970 based on his solution to Hilbert's seventh problem, which goes back to the work of Diophantus from the third century. Baker was a faculty member at Trinity College of Cambridge University, and more information about his life and the mathematics underlying his Fields Medal work can be found in this article published by The Guardian.

Peter Hagis passed away on January 11, 2018, at the age of 91. He was professor emeritus at Temple University and a member of the MAA for 64 years. Hagis was a number theorist and more information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Franklin Kellogg passed away on January 9, 2018, at the age of 91. He was a long-serving faculty member at Johnson State College in Vermont (now Northern Vermont University) and a member of the MAA for 54 years. More information about Kellogg’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Eleanor Killam passed away on January 1, 2018, at the age of 84. She was a member of the MAA for 55 years and Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). Killam was one of three professor who established what is now known as the Jacob-Cohen-Killam Mathematics Competition at UMass. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

2017

(Gary) Gulbenkian passed away in 2017 at the age of 95. Gulbenkian was a member of the MAA for 45 years and worked at General Precision, Inc. in New Jersey. Gulbenkian was one of the contributors to this declassified defense report.

Rudy Horne passed away unexpectedly on December 12, 2017, at the age of 49. He was an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Morehouse College, and he also taught at Florida State University. Horne is best known as the mathematics consultant for the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures”, with details about his contributions available from Oklahoma University. For his work on the film, he gave the NAM David Harold Blackwell Lecture at the 2017 MAA MathFest, and he has been described as a “rock star” in the mathematics community. Thoughts of his passing and photographs from his life are available on Twitter and from the University of North Carolina. His obituary was published in the Chicago Sun Times.

Jean McDill passed away on December 8, 2017, at the age of 81. She was professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) after retiring in 2001, and a member of the MAA for 47 years. McDill was known for her work to develop active learning computer projects for the teaching of differential equations, and she was co-author of a text on differential equations. More information about her life and career can be found in this remembrance from Cal Poly and her obituary.

Robert Rosenbaum passed away on December 3, 2017, at the age of 102. He was a professor emeritus at Wesleyan University (Connecticut) and a member of the MAA for 60 years. At Wesleyan, Rosenbaum serves as dean, provost, chancellor, and acting president. He also founded PIMMS (Project to Increase Mastery in Mathematics and Science) in 1979. Middletown, CT celebrated two “Robert A. Rosenbaum Days” in 2004 and 2015. More information about his life and career can be found in an oral history and a remembrance, both published by Wesleyan.

Jerry Linnstaedter passed away on November 22, 2017, at the age of 80. He was Professor Emeritus at Arkansas State University and a member of the MAA for 49 years. Linnstaedter earned his PhD from Vanderbilt University, and when he retired in 2007, he was cited for his “outstanding leadership, caring mentorship, and quality teaching”. Further information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Adelbert (Del) W. Ransom passed away on November 20, 2017, at the age of 88. He was a Professor Emeritus at Embry-Riddle University and a member of the MAA for 64 years. Along with his career as a professor, Ransom worked at Patrick Air Force Base and for NASA during the moon exploration era. More information can be found in his obituary.

Herbert Nadler passed away in October 2017 at the age of 85. He was an actuary in New York during his career, and life member of the MAA.

Jeffrey Remmel died unexpectedly on September 29, 2017, at the age of 68. He was a member of the MAA and a professor at the University of California – San Diego. Remmel’s research focused on combinatorics and he was also deeply involved with the CalTeach Science and Math Teacher Initiative. At UCSD, he served as an Associate Dean of Physical Sciences for 16 years. Substantial information about his life and career can be found in this memorial article from UCSD and his obituary.

Walter A. Rosenkrantz passed away on September 19, 2017, at the age of 79. He was a member of the MAA for 45 years and was Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with research interests in mathematical statistics. His obituary is available online.

Stan Chadwick passed away on September 11, 2017, at the age of 76. He was Professor Emeritus at Northwestern State University (Louisiana) and a member of the MAA for 28 years. He served as the governor of the Louisiana-Mississippi Section and in 2014 received that section’s outstanding service award. Chadwick also received the first Distinguished Service Award ever given by the Louisiana Association of Mathematics Teachers. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Kenneth I. Gross passed away on September 10, 2017, at the age of 78. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont and a member of the MAA for 47 years. Gross was devoted to enhancing the teaching of mathematics in Vermont. For example, he was the founder of the Vermont Mathematics Initiative, which has had a national impact on mathematics education. For the MAA, Gross was currently serving on the Dolciani Award Committee and received the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award in 2008 for distinguished teaching. He also received the MAA’s Halmos-Ford Award in 1979 and the Chauvenet Prize in 1981, and he served on several committees such as the AMS-MAA Joint Archives Committee. Further details about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from Penn State University, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

Brenda Jean Philips Bloomgarden passed away on September 8, 2017, at the age of 75. She was Professor Emeritus of mathematics at Chesapeake College and a member of the MAA for 34 years. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Thomas Saaty passed away on August 14, 2017, at the age of 91. He was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the MAA for 60 years. Saaty was well known as a pioneer in the field of operations research, spending several years early in his career working for the United States government in a variety of roles such as director of advanced planning in the Office of Naval Research. In the 1960’s, he wrote Mathematical Methods of Arms Control and Disarmament. In 1973, he was awarded the MAA’s Ford-Halmos Award (then the Ford Award) for his article in the Monthly, and he is included in Paul Halmos’ Who’s That Mathematician collection. In 2008, he received the INFORMS Impact Prize for his development of the analytic hierarchy process. More information about Saaty’s life and career can be found in a memorial in INFORMS news, as well as tributes from many others.

Pamela Anne Pedersen passed away on August 13, 2017, at the age of 69. She was a mathematics teacher at St. Joseph’s Academy (MO) and a member of the MAA for 33 years. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Cathleen S. Morawetz passed away on August 8, 2017, at the age of 94. She was Professor Emerita at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the MAA for 45 years. A pioneering woman in mathematics and science, Morawetz made significant contributions in partial differential equations and applied mathematics. For example, she demonstrated the impossibility in the real world of creating aircraft wings that are shock-free. Morawetz was the second woman to serve at the President of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and she received the MAA’s Lester Ford Award in 1980. She was often honored for her achievements with prestigious awards such as the 2006 Birkhoff Prize and the 2004 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and she was the first woman invited to give the AMS Gibbs lecture (in 1981). She was also the first female mathematician to receive the National Medal of Science. Extensive information about Morawetz’ life and career can be found in her obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post, her page on MacTutor, a remembrance in SIAM News, and a memorial article from New York University.

Raymond Spong passed away on July 30, 2017, at the age of 93. He was a retired mathematical analyst in the research and development department at Electric Boat in Connecticut. Spong was a member of the MAA for 58 years and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary and this article from 2009.

Dmitri Thoro passed away on July 25, 2017, at the age of 97. He was a member of the MAA for a remarkable 69 years. He was also an emeritus faculty member at San Jose State University. Thoro studied combinatorics and Fibonacci numbers. For the MAA, he was an associate editor for the book review section of Mathematics Magazine in the 1960’s. Thoro was known for his many years helping to organize San Jose State’s Math Field Day for high school students.

Maryam Mirzakhani passed away unexpectedly on July 14, 2017, at the age of 40. For her highly-creative work in geometry and dynamical systems, she was the first woman (and first Iranian) to be awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Mirzakhani was a professor at Stanford University, and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne reacted to the news by observing, “Her contributions as both a scholar and a role model are significant and enduring, and she will be dearly missed here at Stanford and around the world" Among the vast collection of articles on Mirzakhani’s life and work are her New York Times obituary, a collection of tributes posted by the AMS, this NPR remembrance, an article from Stanford University, commentary from Terence Tao, and an in-depth piece in The New Yorker by Siobhan Roberts. Many of the articles include further links to videos of Mirzakhani as a teacher and scholar.

Norman W. Johnson passed away on July 13, 2017, at the age of 86. He was Professor Emeritus at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and a member of the MAA for 64 years. Johnson is best known for his enumeration of polyhedra with regular faces in 1966, now known as the Johnson solids. A fund in his honor to promote public understanding of mathematics and computers sciences was established at Wheaton College in 2000. More information about his career can be found on his Wikipedia page and in a remembrance from Joseph Malkevitch.

William T. Sledd passed away on July 6, 2017, at the age of 81. He was Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University and a member of the MAA for 60 years. Sledd was an expert in Karamata matrices and was remembered by his students after his death. His obituary is available online.

William S. Massey passed away on June 17, 2017, at the age of 96. He was emeritus faculty at Yale University and a member of the MAA for 55 years. Massey was an algebraic topologist known for the cohomology operation called the Massey product and for his text A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology. More information about his life and career can be found in a memorial article from Yale and his obituary.

Robert Wiggin passed away on June 2, 2017, at the age of 80. In Massachusetts, he was a mathematics teacher and department chair at Brookline High School, and he also taught at Mesietta High School. Wiggin was a member of the MAA for 21 years. Further information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Jacob Feldman passed away on May 28, 2017, at the age of 89. He was a Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at UC Berkeley and a lifetime member of the MAA, holding membership for 29 years. Feldman was known for his contributions to ergodic theory and stochastic processes. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from Berkeley and his obituary.

John D. Oosterhout passed away on May 9, 2017. He was a member of the MAA for 45 years. Oosterhout was an engineer who worked for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Goddard Retirees & Alumni Association has published a short obituary for Oosterhout. Also available is a photo of him on stage at St. John’s College.

Paul Comba passed away on April 5, 2017, at the age of 91. He was a member of the MAA for 65 years! Comba worked for IBM as a software developer for several decades, focusing on cryptography. He also was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii early in his career. After retiring from IBM in 1991, he devoted his energies to astronomy, building the Prescott Observatory in Arizona and discovering hundreds of minor planets that are listed on his Wikipedia page. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Caren Diefenderfer passed away on March 30, 2017. She was a professor at Hollins College and a very active member of the MAA for 36 years. Diefenderfer was a pioneer in the field of Quantitative Literacy, leading workshops across the country on the subject and co-founding the MAA SIGMAA QL. Among the MAA committees that she served on were the Classroom Resource Materials Editorial Board, the Nominating Committee, and the Council on Outreach Programs. For her outstanding teaching and leadership, in January 2017, she was award the MAA’s Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award. In addition, she co-edited The Calculus Collection: A Resource for AP* and Beyond, published by the MAA, and recently completed just a term as Governor of the MD-DC-VA Section. Extensive information about her life and career can be found in her Haimo Award citation in the JMM17 prize booklet (page 13), a memorial statement from Hollins College, and her obituary.

Arthur Grainger passed away on March 28, 2017, at the age of 74. He was a retired Associate Professor at Morgan State University and a member of the MAA for 43 years. Grainger received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) in 2014. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance in the NAM newsletter.

Eugene and Kathryn B. Tollwere strong supporters of the MAA. Eugene passed away on March 6, 2017 at the age of 97, and Kathryn passed away on November 28, 2005 at the age of 78. Eugene Toll was a physicist who also served in the U.S. Navy, while Kathryn was an engineer who worked for General Electric. Kathryn joined the MAA in 1957 and there is a note from her in the AWM newsletter from May-June 1983. Eugene Toll’s obituary is also available.

Kenneth Arrow passed away on February 21, 2017, at the age of 95. In 1972, Arrow won the Nobel Prize in Economics for “pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.” The best-known example is Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, proving that under certain reasonable hypotheses it is impossible to devise logically consistent voting rules. Arrow’s work was critical to the mathematizing of the field of economics, and he also published papers in operations research and game theory. Arrow was the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Among the vast information about his life and career online is his Mathematics Genealogy Project page, the Duke University repository of his papers, and this article from Stanford University.

Raymond Smullyan passed away on February 6, 2017, at the age of 96. Smullyan was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Oscar Ewing professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. Known as the creator of incredibly creative logic-based puzzles, and author of the the 1978 book What Is the Name of This Book?, he was described by the late Martin Gardner as “the most entertaining logician and set theorist who ever lived,” as evidenced by an interview on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He published over thirty books in his areas of interest, well into his 90s, on mathematical logic, philosophy, and puzzles. Extensive information about his life and career can be found in The New York Times and his obituary.

David V. Wend passed away on January 23, 2017, at the age of 93. He was a professor at Montana State University until his retirement in 1991 and a member of the MAA for 65 years. Wend (pictured here) was a specialist in differential equations. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Ralph Raimi passed away on January 2, 2017, at the age of 92. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester and a member of the MAA for 48 years. Raimi was active in K-12 education reform and was known for his writings on Benford’s Law. More information about his life and career can found in this remembrance from the University of Rochester.

2016

Mario Martelli passed away on December 30, 2016, at the age of 79. He was Professor Emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and a member of the MAA for 34 years. Martelli was an expert in differential equations and boundary value problems, with an active program of research with undergraduates. In 1995, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award of the entire California State University system. He was active in the MAA, particularly the Committee on Undergraduate Student Activities & Chapters, and he was a key organizer of the student poster session for several years. More information about Martelli’s life and career can be found in this citation from the Southern California Section (which awarded him the Certificate for Meritorious Service in 2000), this article from Cal State, and his obituary.

Anthony Keeping passed away on December 25, 2016. He lived in the United Kingdom for several decades and was on the faculty of the University of Missouri in 1970. Keeping was a member of the MAA for 51 years.

Alan Bunner passed away on December 19, 2016, at the age of 84. He was a mathematics instructor at Culver Academies (Indiana) from 1957 through 1992 and a member of the MAA for 55 years. At the Culver Academies, Bunner held the Vlasic Chair of Teaching and the William Pitt Oakes Memorial Chair of Mathematics. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from Culver, and an obituary.

Felix Browder passed away on December 10, 2016, at the age of 89. Browder was a faculty member at the University of Chicago for over 20 years before moving to Rutgers University for the latter part of his career, where he served as Vice President for Research. Browder was a pioneer in nonlinear function analysis – an example being the publication in 1965 of what is now known as the Browder Fixed Point Theorem. He was also a well-known leader in the scientific community and served as the President of the AMS. Browder was a member of the MAA for 24 years and a Putnam fellow. Much more information about his life and career can be found in an article in The Washington Post, this remembrance from the University of Chicago, his biography in the MacTutor archive, and an interview with Browder in the AMS Notices.

>C. Wayne Patty passed away on December 8, 2016, at the age of 84. He was a Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech and a member of the MAA for 58 years. Patty was the author of several textbooks including Foundations of Higher Mathematics (with Peter Fletcher) and Foundations of Topology. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

William F. Trench passed away on December 4, 2016, at the age of 85. He was a member of the MAA for 63 years and the former Cowles Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Trinity University. He also was a professor at Drexel University for more than two decades. To help students with the problem of affordability of textbooks, Trench provided open access online to his textbooks on real analysis and differential equations. More information about his career can be found in this article from Trinity University.

W. Wistar Comfort passed away on November 28, 2016, at the age of 83. Comfort was Professor Emeritus at Wesleyan University and a member of the MAA for 62 years. Comfort worked principally in general topology, publishing three books and about 150 papers. He was active in professional organizations, especially the American Mathematical Society. Among his contributions to the AMS was his service as Associate Secretary and Council member for many years. In addition, he was a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. More information about his life and career can be found in this interview with Comfort in 1997 and an obituary written by his daughter that was published in the AMS Notices (see page 275).

T. S. Michael passed away on November 22, 2016, at the age of 56. He was a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy until his death. He was known for his book How to Guard an Art Gallery and Other Discrete Mathematical Adventures and won the MAA Pólya Award in 2012 for a related article “Guards, Galleries, Fortresses and the Octoplex”. In 2016, he was awarded the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award for his outstanding work as a teacher and scholar. His deep impact on students and colleagues can be seen in several remembrances (#1 #2 #3 #4) and his obituary.

Dennison R. Brown passed away on November 19, 2016, at the age of 82. He was a member of the MAA for 60 years and Professor Emeritus at the University of Houston. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Elaine M. Hubbard passed away on November 18, 2016, at the age of 66. She was Professor Emeritus at Kennesaw State University, after retiring in 2003, and a member of the MAA for 51 years. Hubbard was the author of 13 textbooks in mathematics and was known for use of technology of teaching. More information about her life and career, as well as commentary from several people, can be found in an appreciation published by Georgia Tech, an announcement of a scholarship in her name, and her obituary.

Max A. Sobel passed away on November 11, 2016, at the age of 92. He was a professor at Montclair State University until his retirement, and a member of the MAA for 48 years. Sobel served as the President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and in 1998 he was received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mathematics Education Trust. He also served as the Chair of the New Jersey section of the MAA. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary and this remembrance from Montclair State University.

Cris Roosenraad passed away on October 24, 2016, at the age of 75. He had emeritus status at Carleton College, based on his service as a Senior Lecturer in mathematics, and as Dean of Students. Roosenraad originated the course for training new teachers of AP calculus at Carleton’s Summer Teaching Institute, and he was a member of the MAA for 54 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary. In addition, comments from colleagues and students can be found on this Carleton page.

Joseph Rotman passed away on October 16, 2016, at the age of 82. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the MAA for 58 years. Rotman was the author of nearly a dozen textbooks in algebra and topology, as well as the text Journey into Mathematics, which is used in bridge courses that introduce proof. Information about Rotman’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jacob K. Goldhaber passed away on October 7, 2016, at the age of 92. Goldhaber was Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, until his retirement, and a member of the MAA for 66 years. Goldhaber specialized in algebra and served as the Dean of Graduate Studies at Maryland. He is described in a number of historical reflections on the UMD Department of Mathematics web site. His obituary is also available.

Joseph Dela Rutledge passed away on October 3, 2016, at the age of 88. He was a member of the MAA for 70 years! Rutledge was a research mathematician at IBM for 45 years, until his retirement in 2003. At IBM, he was co-creator of the TRAC Point II mini-joystick for laptop computers. Before IBM, he worked for Remington Rand, where he was one of the engineers responsible for the development of UNIVAC. More details of his life and career can be found at the Online Archive of California and a handout from his memorial service.

Henry F. Ivey passed away on September 28, 2016, at the age of 95. Before retirement, he was a physicist for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Ivey was a member of the MAA for 20 years, and more information on his life can be found in his brief obituary.

Todorka (“Dora”) Nedeva passed away unexpectedly on September 19, 2016, at the age of 44. She was an Associate Professor at Saginaw Valley State University and a member of the MAA. Nedeva was an algebraist, earning her PhD from the University of Kentucky in 2005. More information about her life and career can be found in this remembrance from SVSU and her obituary.

Alan E. Ruftypassed away on September 10, 2020, at the age of 73. He was a member of the MAA for 31 years. Rufty worked for the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, and over the years published several research papers in mathematical physics. He was also a talented chess player. Some information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Frederic Gooding Jr., a member of the MAA, passed away on September 8, 2016, at the age of 82. He was an itinerant faculty member, teaching at East Coast schools such as Gallaudet University and Trinity College. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Joseph Keller passed away on September 7, 2016, at the age of 93. Keller was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and was considered by many to be the “Dean of Applied Mathematics”. Keller made impressive contributions in many areas of applied mathematics: numerical analysis, bifurcation theory, computational fluid dynamics, homotopy methods, and parallel computation. He was best known for his work in mathematical physics and for his Geometrical Theory of Diffraction. Keller received several awards for his work, including the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1997. He was also very active in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), as indicated in this tribute. An interview with Keller was published in 2004 in the AMS Notices. Among the numerous remembrances of his life and career are article from Stanford University and SIAM and this obituary in the New York Times.

Jean-Christophe;passed away on September 3, 2016, at the age of 59. Yoccoz was a professor at the Collège de France and was awarded the prestigious Fields medal in 1994 for his groundbreaking work in dynamical systems. He introduced a combinatorial technique which applies to Julia sets, a method which are now called “Yoccoz puzzles”. More information about his life and career can be found in this tribute from his college.

Marcellus Waddill passed away on August 24, 2016, at the age of 86. He was Professor Emeritus at Wake Forest University, a researcher in the area of Fibonacci and recursive sequences, and a member of the MAA for 52 years. Waddill was an active member of the Southeastern Section of the MAA, receiving the 1996 Section Distinguished Service Award and the 1999 Meritorious Service Award. More information about Waddill’s life and career can be found in this article, this interview transcript, pages from the history of Wake Forest University, and his obituary.

Nicholas Scheall passed away unexpectedly on August 18, 2016, at the age of 39. He was a Lecturer of Mathematics at Saginaw Valley State University and was known for his volunteer work for mathematics competitions. Scheall was a member of the MAA for 13 years. For more information about his life, see his obituary and this remembrance from SVSU.

John W. Goppelt passed away on August 7, 2016, at the age of 92. Goppelt was a member of the MAA for 25 years. Goppelt was trained as an engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then earned his M.D. in psychiatry. He practiced psychiatry for more than 50 years, and taught the subject at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Nevertheless, his interest and support in mathematics never waned. More details of his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Jonathan Borwein passed away on August 2, 2016, at the age of 65. He was a member of the MAA for 40 years and a member of the editorial board of the American Mathematical Monthly. At the time of his death, he was a Laureate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia, after spending much of his career at Simon Fraser University and Dalhousie University in Canada. Borwein is known for his seminal work in the area of experimental mathematics, for which he won numerous prizes, including the MAA Chauvenet Prize for an article he co-wrote in 1989. At Simon Fraser, he was the founding Director of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics. Details about his life and work can be found in this press release from the Canadian Mathematical Society, a post on this blog that he maintained with David Bailey, this remembrance, and his Wikipedia page.

Seymour Papert passed away on July 31, 2016, at the age of 88. He was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an influential force in computer education. He was one of the developer of the Logo “turtle” programming language, and a close colleague of Marvin Minsky, who co-founder of M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (and also passed away in 2016). Papert and Minsky co-authored Perceptrons (1969), a seminal book on developing artificial intelligence through neural networks. Detailed information on Papert’s life and career can be found in The Guardian and The New York Times.

Solomon Feferman passed away on July 26, 2016, at the age of 87. He was a Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy (Emeritus) at Stanford University and a member of the MAA for 37 years. Feferman was well-known for his influential contributions to mathematical logic, and he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2003. He was also a leader in the community of logicians, serving as President of the Association for Symbolic Logic for two years. More information about his life and career can be found in this tribute from Stanford’s Department of Philosophy, and this page.

Jacek Fabrykowski passed away on July 12, 2016, at the age of 66. He was a faculty member at Youngstown State University. Fabrykowski was a significant leader in the area of competitive mathematical problem solving, serving as the chair the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad Committee (USAMO) since 2009, which directly contributed to the victories by the United States teams in the 2015 and 2016 International Mathematics Olympiad. He also served for several years on the Subcommittee on the American Invitational Mathematics Exam. These are all programs associated with the MAA, and Fabrykowski was an MAA member for several years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

John Kenelly Jr. passed away on July 3, 2016, at the age of 80. He was Professor Emeritus at Clemson University and a member of the MAA for 57 years. Kenelly was a distinguished leader in the mathematics community. He was involved in NSF-funded projects in mathematics education as a principal investigator, focusing on teaching with technology, and as an NSF program officer. He served as the president of International Math Olympiad in 2001. Kenelly was also a very active member of the MAA. In 2012, he completed a decade of appreciated, quality service as Treasurer of the Association. During his career, he also served on the MAA Board of Governors, the Budget Committee, and the Committee on Calculus Reform, as well as other committees. In recognition of his contributions, a room at MAA Headquarters is named for Kenelly. More information about his life and career can be found in this article from Clemson University, this news update from the MAA, and his obituary.

Reza Sarhangi passed away on July 1, 2016, at the age of 63. He was a faculty member at Towson University, and earlier in his career, he was a member of the faculty at Southwestern College. Sarhangi was a leading figure in the intersection of mathematics, art, and music, and was best known as the founder and president of the Bridges Organization – the organizers of the annual Bridges conference. He was a member of the MAA for 26 years and served on the AMS-MAA Task Force on Art Prizes, the MAA Centennial events subcommittee, and the Porter Public lecture committee. Among the online remembrances of his life and career are a statement from the Bridges Organization, this note from Carol Bier, and this page by JoAnne Growney.

Robert Kalin passed away on June 15, 2016, at the age of 94. He was Professor Emeritus at the Florida State University and a member of the MAA for 64 years. Kalin, a specialist in mathematics education, was a former president of Mu Alpha Theta – the National High School and Two-Year College Mathematics Honor Society. The Kalin Award from that organization was established in 1981. After his retirement from FSU, he was a leader in the Jewish community in Brownsville, TN.

Fred Krakowski passed away in May 2016. He was a professor emeritus at Sacramento State University (retired, 1992) and a member of the MAA for 58 years.

Tom Apostol passed away on May 8, 2016, at the age of 92. Apostol was a professor at the California Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1992 and a member of the MAA for 66 years. A prolific writer of highly-regarded textbooks and expository articles, he received the MAA's Trevor Evans Award in 1998 and the Lester R. Ford Award in 2005, 2008, and 2010. Apostol was a frequent contributor to the American Mathematical Monthly and Mathematics Magazine, and a current member of the Math Horizons editorial board. In addition, he was the co-author of New Horizons in Geometry, published by the MAA, which received the CHOICE “Outstanding Academic Title” award in 2013. Tom Apostol and his wife Jane were inducted into the MAA’s Icosahedron Society in 2010. He was also an Inaugural Fellow of the AMS and the creator of the award winning Project MATHEMATICS! video series. More information about his life and career can be found on this page at Caltech and his Wikipedia page.

Solomon Golomb passed away on May 1, 2016, at the age of 83. He was a professor at the University of Southern California, and an MAA member for 59 years. Golomb made seminal contributions in communication theory with applications to space communications, and in the area of mathematical games. He won numerous awards, including the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. Golomb was a regular contributor to MAA publications, such as this “Proof Without Words” from linear algebra. Among the numerous remembrances of his life and career are an article from USC, a second from Johns Hopkins (his alma mater), a celebration of his 80th birthday in 2012, and this note in the New York Times.

William B. Barksdale passed away on April 23, 2016, at the age of 78. He worked for McDonnell-Douglas Corporation and was a member of the MAA for 25 years.

Adelaide Sprague passed away on April 20, 2016, at the age of 94. After starting her career as a chemist at the Southern Cotton Oil Laboratory, Sprague taught in the Catholic and Public Schools in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes in Louisiana for 29 years. She was a life member of the MAA, joining in the 1980’s. More information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Marjorie Van Eenam Butcher passed away on April 6, 2016, at the age of 90. She was a member of the MAA for 60 years. Butcher was a professor emeritus at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, being the first woman hired and promoted by the college. She was known for “her dual passions for applied mathematics and chapel music”, as described in this tribute from Trinity, as well as this page. Additional information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Ross Honsberger passed away on April 3, 2016, at the age of 86. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo (Canada), and a member of the MAA for 42 years. Honsberger wrote several books for the MAA, including Ingenuity in Mathematics, and he was a member of the Anneli Lax Editorial board. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from the University of Waterloo, and his obituary.

Marjorie Enneking passed away on March 13, 2016, at the age of 74. She was Professor Emerita at Portland State University after working there for 35 years, and a member of the MAA for 43 years. Enneking was known as a champion of mathematics education and she served on the MAA Board of Governors and an MAA task force on secondary education. Enneking received the Pacific Northwest Certificate of Meritorious Service in 2006. Her obituary can be found here.

Robert Silverman passed away on March 5, 2016, at the age of 87. He was a Professor Emeritus at Wright State University and a member of the MAA for 56 years. He also taught at Syracuse University. Silverman’s research interests revolved around codes and combinatorics. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Donald Josephson passed away on February 25, 2016, at the age of 75. He was a professor at Wheaton College until he retired in 2009, and a member of the MAA for 41 years. For more information about Josephson’s life and career, see this article in the Chicago Tribune, and his obituary.

G. Michael Searcy passed away on February 14, 2016, at the age of 73. He was an associate mathematics professor at LaGrange College (GA) until his retirement in 2007, and a member of the MAA for 51 years. More information about his life and career is available in his obituary.

Kathryn “Kay” Strangman died on February 16, 2016, at the age of 77. She retired as a Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, and also taught at Elmhurst College (Illinois) and Edgewood College (Wisconsin). More information about Strangman’s life and career can be found in this article posted by the University of Wisconsin at the time of her retirement, and her obituary.

Gilbert Palmer passed on February 12, 2016, at the age of 91. He was an Associate Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Geneseo and a member of the MAA for 53 years. Palmer was a founder and first director of a peer-tutoring program for Geneseo students. More information about Palmer’s life and career can be found in his obituary.

William Wagner passed away on February 5, 2016, at the age of 79. He was a member of the MAA for 51 years. During his career, Wagner worked at North American Aviation, Standard Oil of Ohio, the State of Ohio, and The Ohio State University. At Ohio State, he was an Assistant to the Director and Supervisor of Mathematical and Systems Analysis at the Instruction and Research Computer Center. He also taught courses in numerical analysis, computer design, and mathematical statistics for the Department of Statistics. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Carl Sinke passed away on January 20, 2016, at the age of 87. He was a professor at Calvin College (Michigan) until his retirement in 1991, and a member of the MAA for 58 years. Sinke served as department chair at Calvin in the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. More information about Sinke’s life and career can be found on this memorial page at Calvin College and his obituary.

Rogers Newman passed away on January 9, 2016, at the age of 89. He was a professor at Southern University until his retirement, and he was a member of the MAA since 1960. Newman was very active in the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM), serving as its President for ten years, and receiving the NAM Distinguished Service Award in 1994. Among his service to the MAA was his work on the MAA Task Force on Minorities. The MAA published an article in 1996 reviewing his career, and his obituary can be found here.

Norman Sexauer passed away on January 7, 2016, at the age of 90. He was a professor at California State University, Long Beach until his retirement in 1993, and he was a member of the MAA since 1964. Sexauer was known as a dedicated teacher, especially of abstract algebra courses. He was a generous supporter of the MAA. More information about his life can be found in this memoriam from CSULB.

Jean Pedersen passed away on January 1, 2016, at the age of 81. She was a professor at Santa Clara University until her retirement, and she was a member of the MAA for 49 years. Pedersen was known for her research, writing and speaking on polyhedral geometry, combinatorics, and number theory, and with Peter Hilton, Pedersen co-authored A Mathematical Tapestry: Demonstrating the Beautiful Unity of Mathematics. For the MAA, she served on the Spectrum editorial board, and she was awarded the Golden Section’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997. Much more information about her life and career can be found on this page of remembrances from Santa Clara University. There is also a wonderful photograph of Pedersen posted on the SCU web site.

2015

Allan W. Johnson, Jr. was a member of the MAA since 1963, and his death was reported to the MAA in 2015. Johnson, who lived in the Washington, DC, area, published articles in several issues of the Journal of Recreational Mathematics on the subject of magic squares.

Robert Hamer passed away on December 28, 2015, at the age of 65. He was a lifetime member of the MAA, holding membership for 19 years. At his death, Hamer was a research professor of biostatistics and professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. Hamer was known for his work in psychopharmacology and his service to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. More information about his life and career can be found in a remembrance from his university and his obituary.

William H. Warner passed away on December 27, 2015, at the age of 86. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota following his retirement in 1995, and he was a member of the MAA since 1950. Warner was memorialized by Minnesota’s Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics department, and his obituary can be found here.

George Seifert passed away on December 17, 2015, at the age of 94. He was Emeritus Professor at Iowa State University and a member of the MAA for 54 years. Seifert’s research interests were in ordinary and delay differential equations, and he published about 90 papers on the subject. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Joseph A. Spacek passed away on December 13, 2015, at the age of 79. He was a life member of the MAA, with a membership spanning 56 years. Spacek spent the majority of his career with the Texas Highway Department in their Data Processing Division. He also taught in higher education in Alabama and Texas. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Harold V. McIntosh passed away on November 30, 2015, at the age of 86. McIntosh spent most of his career as a teacher and researcher in Mexico, with his final appointment at the Autonomous University of Puebla, in Mexico. He was a member of the MAA for 46 years. McIntosh is known for his seminar work in cellular automata, as well his use of early computer algebra systems to solve problems in physics. Detailed information about his life and career can be found in this article by Paul McJones, as well as a second article on McIntosh and LISP, and this obituary in the Journal of Cellular Automata.

Harvey M. Weitkamp died on November 18, 2015, at the age of 96. He was a member of the MAA for 58 years and an educator in Cincinnati, Ohio during his career. He was noted as a speaker in 1942 at the University of Cincinnati and at the 1954 meeting of the MAA Ohio Section. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Vernise Steadman passed away on November 5, 2015, at the age of 68. Steadman was a professor and department chair at the University of the District of Columbia, and a member of the MAA for 19 years. Steadman received her PhD from Howard University in 1988 and was an expert in functional analysis and differential equations. More information about Dr. Steadman life and career can be found in these online postings.

Carla Dee Moravitz Martin died on October 27, 2015, at the age of 42. Martin was an Applied Research Mathematicians for the National Security Agency when she died, after her work for several years as a professor at James Madison University. Martin’s research area was numerical linear algebra with a focus on Kronecker products and singular value decomposition. As a member of the MAA, Martin was a Project NExT Fellow (2006 – sepia dot), a member of Committee on Business, Industry, and Government Mathematics, and the writer of a well-received article in MAA Focus: “What Can I Do with a Math Degree?” She was also the co-author of the MAA book: Keeping it R.E.A.L.: Research Experiences for all Learners. Extensive information about Martin’s life and career can be found in this obituary published by the SIAM, on this MAA page, and in the Fall 2015 newsletter of the MAA Business-Industry-Government SIGMAA.

Arnold Ostebee passed away on October 11, 2015, at the age of 65. Ostebee was a professor at St. Olaf’s college until his retirement in 2014, and he also served as Assistant Provost at St. Olaf’s for a decade. Ostebee was a member of the MAA since 1981 and served the MAA in a variety of ways. He was associate editor of the American Mathematical Monthly for twelve years, and he led the Professional Enhancement Program workshop “Leading the Academic Department: A Workshop for Chairs of Mathematical Sciences Departments” several times. Ostebee was the co-author of several calculus books with his colleague and former MAA President Paul Zorn. Learn more about his life from this page at St. Olaf’s, and his obituary.

Leigh Allan Fiedler passed away on September 20, 2015, at the age of 85. He was a mathematics professor at Black Hawk College (Illinois) and a member of the MAA for 52 years. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

John William Scott “Ian” Cassels passed away on July 27, 2015, at the age of 93. Cassels was elected a Fellow of Trinity (Cambridge) in 1949, and was Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics there. Cassels is best known for his seminal work in the theory of numbers. More information about his life can be found on his Wikipedia page and on this page. There is also a nice anecdote about Cassels in this article on John Conway, as well as a picture of Cassels in the MAA’s Paul Halmos “Who’s That Mathematician?” archive.

Norma P. Schmid passed away on July 6, 2015, at the age of 80. Schmid was a high school mathematics teacher in California before she retired, and she was a member of the MAA since 1956. Schmid was a generous donor to a number of organizations, including the MAA.

Louis Howard passed away on June 28, 2015, at the age of 86. He was emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the MAA for 66 years. Howard was also professor emeritus at Florida State University where he worked for 15 years before his retirement. Howard was an applied mathematician with primary interests in fluid dynamics. Among his awards for his research, he received with the prestigious Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society in 1997. More information about Howard’s life and career can be found in an article from MIT News.

Donald F. Young passed away on June 25, 2015, at the age of 70. He was Professor Emeritus at Southern Polytechnic State University (now consolidated with Kennesaw State University) and a member of the MAA since 1974. His obituary can be found here.

Lynn Arthur Steen passed away on June 21, 2015, at the age of 74. He was a professor at St. Olaf College until his retirement in 2009, and a member of the MAA since 1961. Steen was known for making mathematics more accessible to mathematics students and to people in other fields, and he was the lead writer for the 2004 MAA report "Achieving Quantitative Literacy: An Urgent Challenge for Higher Education". Steen was a leader in the MAA, serving as MAA President in 1985-86, as Editor of Mathematics Magazine from 1976 to 1980, and as an active member of several committees. He received the MAA’s Gung and Hu Award for Distinguished Service in 1992. In addition, he chaired the Conference Board for the Mathematical Sciences from 1988-1990, and led the writing of the important 1989 National Research Council report, "Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education." Steen and his wife were inducted into the MAA’s Icosahedron Society in 2015.For more information about Steen’s life and career, see this remembrance at St. Olaf, St. Olaf’s compendium of highlights from his career, this MAA page, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

George Sell passed away on May 29, 2015, at the age of 78. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota and a life member of the MAA, with membership spanning 55 years. Sell was known for his work on nonautonomous dynamics of differential equations, as well as global attractors, fluids, and climate modeling. From 1984 to 1994 he the director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of Minnesota. More information about Sell’s life and career can be found in this remembrance from the University of Minnesota and comments posted with his obituary..

Norman Grossman passed away on May 29, 2015, at the age of 92. He was a member of the MAA for 59 years. At his retirement, Grossman was the chairman and CEO of the Fairchild-Republic Company on Long Island (now a part of Northrop Grumman). This is a company focused on the design and production of military aircraft such as the A-10 jet. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from the Courant Institute (see page 8) and his obituary.

James Cobb passed away on May 26, 2015, at the age of 87. He was retired from Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel and a U.S. Army Veteran. Cobb was a member of the MAA for 20 years. Information about his family is available in a short obituary.

John Forbes Nash, Jr. and his wife Alicia were killed in a traffic accident in New Jersey on May 23, 2015. Nash, a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University, made seminal contributions in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his work in game theory. Nash was also awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his discovery of what is now called “Nash Equilibria”, as well as the Steele Prize, and the Abel Prize. He is well-known in the world due to the biographical film A Beautiful Mind, which was released in 2001. To learn more about Nash’s life and career, start with his Wikipedia page and this obituary in the New York Times. Also, Nash and his work are featured on many MAA pages.

James Kiefer

Kiran Babu Chilakamarri passed away on April 25, 2015, at the age of 62. He was a professor at Texas Southern University and a member of the MAA since 2014. He specialized in graph theory, although his research applications spanned many mathematics and scientific domains. He earned two PhDs and authored over 30 papers, many in collaboration.

Susan Callahan passed away on April 20, 2015. She was a professor at Cottey College (Missouri) and a member of the MAA since 1978. She received the Missouri Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002. Callahan was Governor of the Missouri Section of the MAA at the time of her death, and also a member of the Committee on Sessions of Contributed Papers. Many students commented on her passing on Facebook, and information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

James Kiefer passed away on April 19, 2015, at the age of 79. He was a research mathematician for the National Institute of Health (NIH) and a life member of the MAA, holding membership for 38 years.

Toma (Thomas) Tonev passed away on February 22, 2015. He was a professor at the University of Montana and a member of the MAA. Tonev’s research interests were in functional analysis, complex analysis, and function algebras. Learn more about Tonev from his obituary and see this photograph from the University of Montana. In addition, see the Spring 2015 Montana newsletter on this page for two articles about Tonev’s life and career.

Issac Edward Block passed away on February 18, 2015, at the age of 90. Block was a founder and longtime managing director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) until his retirement in 1994, and a member of the MAA from 1952 until 2000. An extensive discussion of his career and his substantial contributions to SIAM can be found on the SIAM web site. His obituary is here.

Mika Seppälä passed away suddenly on January 23, 2015, at the age of 63. He was a professor at Florida State University and a member of the MAA since 1999. Seppälä was known for his work in online education, including connections to the MAA’s WebWork project. More about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Virginia Halmos passed away on January 19, 2015, at the age of 99. Virginia was a long-time MAA benefactor and a widow of the prominent mathematician and former editor of the American Mathematical Monthly Paul Halmos. Read more about her life and career. Paul and Virginia Halmos were inducted into the MAA’s Icosahedron Society in 2003.

Donald W. Kahn passed away on January 16, 2015, at the age of 79. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Kahn was known for his contributions to algebraic topology, authoring several books such as Topology: An Introduction to the Point-Set and Algebraic Areas. He also served as a state representative for 40 years, and was recognized as a talented musician, photographer, and raconteur. His obituary can be found here.

2014

William Ramon Arnold was a member of the MAA since 2004, and his death was reported to the MAA in 2014. Arnold taught at Colorado State University and was co-editor of the book Mathematics is a verb: options for teaching.

Jim Kiernan passed away on December 14, 2014, at the age of 65. He was a high school teacher for most of his career, at Edward R. Murrow High School in New York City, and a member of the MAA since 1999. Kiernan also taught the history of mathematics at Brooklyn College and was an active participant at history of mathematics programs such as the MAA-sponsored Institute in the History of Mathematics and its Use in Teaching. He was an author on two of the modules included in Historical Modules for the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics, published by the MAA. Kiernan served on the editorial board for MAA’s Convergence and wrote book reviews and other items for the publication. Kiernan is remembered in this HPM newsletter, an article in the bulletin of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics, and an online memory book.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away on December 12, 2014, at the age of 73. He was a professor at Middlesex University (UK). In 2009, Grattan-Guinness received the Kenneth O. May Prize and Medal , awarded every four years by the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics. Among his accomplishments, Grattan-Guinness founded the journal History and Philosophy of Logic. His article “History or Heritage? An Important Distinction in Mathematics and for Mathematics Education” was published in the Monthly. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

James Stewart passed away on December 3, 2014, at the age of 73. Stewart, a member of the MAA since 1962, is best known for his series of widely-used calculus textbooks. Integral House, Stewart’s home in Toronto that he had built in the early 2000’s, is famous in architectural circles. In addition, he is a noted philanthropist and professor emeritus at McMaster University. Extensive information about his life and career can be found in this MAA interview, his Wikipedia page, an interview with Cengage, and in two obituaries.

Thomas Hungerford passed away on November 28, 2014, at the age of 78. He was a member of the MAA since 1964. Hungerford was best known for his widely-used texts in abstract algebra. During his career, Hungerford was a faculty member at the University of Washington, Cleveland State University, and Saint Louis University. His obituary can be found here.

Eugene B. Dynkin passed away on November 14, 2014, at the age of 90. He was a professor at Cornell University until his retirement in 2010. Dynkin was viewed as a global leader in the study of probability, and his work early in his career on Lie algebras led to the development of what are now called “Dynkin diagrams”. He also conducted audio and video interviews with a wide range of mathematicians during his career. For an extensive discussion of his life and career, see this article from Cornell and this web page at IMS.

Alexander Grothendieck died on November 13, 2014. He was a well-known and leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966. Grothendieck was associated primarily with the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS) in France. The MAA has a review of the book Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait, and a photograph of Grothendieck from the mid 1950s is part of the Paul R. Halmos Who’s That Mathematician collection. Extensive information about his life and career can be found on many web site including his Wikipedia page, the AMS Notices, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and this remembrance from David Mumford.

Paulus Gerdes passed away on November 11, 2014, on his 62nd birthday. He was a professor at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique until 1989, and then at Pedagogical University in Mozambique until his death. Gerdes was a well-known ethnomathematician, and the MAA published his book Geometry from Africa: Mathematical and Educational Explorations in 1999. Other writings by Gerdes on the MAA web site can be found here. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance.

Hans Schneider passed away on October 28, 2014, at the age of 87. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until his retirement in 1993, and a member of the MAA since 1957. Schneider is considered one of the one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century in the field of linear algebra and matrix analysis, as his contributions formed a basis for the algorithms leading to the development of Google. Schneider is widely known for reviving Linear Algebra and its Applications through his leadership of the journal, and he co-founded the International Matrix Group in 1987, now known as the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS). Schneider was memorialized in several online articles, he has a Wikipedia page, and he wrote his own obituary.

Henry Seebald passed away on October 19, 2014, at the age of 94. He was a faculty member at Lehigh College and a member of the MAA since 1948. A photograph is available here.

Peter Stanek passed away on October 18, 2014, at the age of 76. He was a member of the MAA since 1973, and worked in industry until he retired from Lockheed-Martin. Stanek’s was the co-author of a patent in image processing technology. After his retirement, he devoted his energies to the mission of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, and he served as president of this organization. Stanek devoted considerable time and talent to the MAA (as has his wife, Prof. Jean Bee Chan of Sonoma State University), and they have established the Chan-Stanek Lecture for Students which is at MAA MathFest each year. Stanek and Chan were awarded the MAA Certificate of Meritorious Service in 2013 for their contributions to the Golden (Northern California) Section, and to the national organization. Highlights of Stanek’s work for the MAA nationally include Governor-at-Large for the BIG (Business-Industry-Government) SIGMAA and member of the MAA Focus Editorial Board.

Jackie (Jacqueline) Stedall died of cancer on September 27, 2014, at the age of 64. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and was known for her influential work as a historian of mathematics. Among her nine books is History of Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2012) and From Cardano’s Great Art to Lagrange’s Reflections: Filling a Gap in the History of Algebra (2011). Several of her books were reviewed by the MAA, and extensive information about her career and life can be found in this obituary in The Guardian.

Nuri Yelman Ölçer passed away on September 12, 2014, at the age of 82. He was a life member of the MAA for 28 years and a researcher at Ordnance Engineering Associates in Chicago. An expert in partial differential equations, he also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and spent two years at Argonne National Laboratory. More information about Ölçer can be found on this page and his obituary.

David A. Stone passed away on August 27, 2014, at the age of 69. He was a professor at Brooklyn College and member of the MAA since 2003. Stone’s research publications in mathematics involved the intersection of topology, differential geometry, and combinatorics. He was also known for his paper, “Omni Meets Feynman: The Interaction between Popular and Scientific Cultures”. His obituary can be found here.

Bennie Lane passed away on August 26, 2014, at the age of 79. He was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University until his retirement in 1997, and he was a member of the MAA since 1961. His obituary can be found here.

Paul Zwier passed away on August 21, 2014, at the age of 86. He was a faculty member at Calvin College until his retirement in 1995, and a member of the MAA since 1962. Zwier played a key role in the formation of the Association for Christians in the Mathematical Sciences wrote articles for their journal, and served as the organization’s president. More information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance from Calvin College and his obituary.

Bert K. Waits passed away on July 27, 2014, at the age of 73. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at The Ohio State University and a member of the MAA since 1963. Waits was best known for the key role he played (with Frank Demana) in designing the Texas Instruments family of graphing calculators and promoting the use of handheld technology in mathematics education. Demana and Waits co-authored several high school and college textbooks. For more information about Waits’ life and career, see this remembrance by the Ohio Section of the MAA, this biography on the NCTM web site, and his obituary.

Marcel Richter passed away on July 11, 2014, at the age of 82. He was an economics professor at the University of Minnesota until his retirement, and a member of the MAA since 1961. Richter was known for his use of mathematical logic and set theory to study preferences, rationality and choice. He received an honorary doctorate from Keio University in Japan, and more information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Klaus Peters passed away on July 7, 2014, at the age of 77. He was a member of the MAA. A mathematician by training, his career was devoted to mathematics publishing, and known for his lasting impact as a publisher of books in mathematics, physics, and computer science. He and his wife, Alice, started AK Peters publishing in 1992. Extensive information about his career can be found in this retrospective in the Boston Globe, a set of reflections in the AMS Notices, this MAA page, another remembrance in the AMS Notices, this Wikipedia page, and his obituary.

Abdulalim A. Shabazz passed away on June 25, 2014 at the age of 87. During his career, he was a professor at Clark Atlanta University, as well as Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Shabazz was a member of the MAA since 1957. Shabazz was known for his outstanding work as a mentor of African American students in mathematics, and among the awards he received was the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. An extensive discussion of his career can be found on this MAA page, his Wikipedia page, and this tribute page.

Joachim (Jim) Lambek passed away on June 23, 2014, at the age of 91. He was a professor at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) until his retirement, and a member of the MAA since 1954. Lambek was known for his contributions to algebra, logic, category theory, computational linguistics, and other special areas of mathematics. Extensive information about his life and career can be found in this talk given on his 75th birthday, this commentary, his Wikipedia page, and his obituary. Photographs of Lambek and colleagues can be seen in this “souvenir” page of a 2002 meeting that honored him.

Edward Friedman passed away on June 19, 2014, at the age of 87. He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Hartford until his retirement in 1992, and a member of the MAA since 1950. His obituary can be found here.

Richard M. Cohn passed away on June 17, 2014, at the age of 94. He was professor emeritus at Rutgers University, having retired in 1990, and he was a member of the MAA since 1949. An article on Cohn’s life and career can be found here (on page 3), and his obituary is here.

Daniel C. Comiskey passed away on June 11, 2014, at the age of 84. He was a teacher at the Taft School in Watertown, CT for 35 years, and a member of the MAA since 1986. Read more about his life.

Amy King passed away on June 7, 2014, at the age of 85. She was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University until her retirement in 1998, and she was a member of the MAA since 1961. King received the Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics award from the Kentucky Section of the Mathematical Association of America, for her contributions to mathematics education. Her obituary can be found here.

David H. Nash passed away on June 6, 2014, at the age of 70. During his career, he was a mathematician for General Motors and a professor at Drexel University. He was a member of the MAA since 1972, and his paper “Differential Equations and the Battle of Trafalgar”, published in the MAA’s College Mathematics Journal, has been used in numerous differential equation classes.

Kathryn Baker passed away on June 2, 2014, at the age of 101. She was a professor at Baylor University and taught at other institutions and a member of the MAA since 1932 (a remarkable 82 years). Baker was known for her twin passions for mathematics and art, and she became a master weaver. She also founded the Baylor Children’s Theater. Baker and her husband Paul Baker (a well-known professor of theatre) contributed their papers to Texas State University, and more information about her life and career can be found in her obituary.

Walter Mientka passed away on June 1, 2014, at the age of 88. He was a professor at the University of Nebraska until his retirement in 2002, and he was a member of the MAA since 1952. Among his accomplishments, Mientka served as the Executive Director of the American Mathematics Competitions for 22 years, and four years he was the Executive Director of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad. For more information about his life and career, see this remembrance, and his obituary.

Samuel Councilman passed away on June 1, 2014 at the age of 79. Councilman was a professor of mathematics at California State University, Long Beach until his retirement, and he was a member of the MAA since 1964. A picture of Councilman presenting a scholarship to a CSULB student can be found on this page, and his obituary can be found here.

Robert Steinberg passed away on May 25, 2014, at the age of 92. Steinberg was a professor at UCLA until his retirement in 1992 and a member of the MAA since 1974. Steinberg was well-known for his innovative work in algebraic groups for which he was awarded the Leroy Steele prize from the AMS in 1985, along with other awards. Extensive information about his life and career can be found in this remembrance by V. S. Varadarajan, this article from UCLA, and his Wikipedia page.

Russell Rainville passed away unexpectedly on May 21, 2014, at the age of 70. He was a professor at the University of Maine-Farmington until his death, and a member of the MAA since 1980. Rainville was both a mathematician and an artist, and one of Dr. Rainville’s most recent accomplishments was curating Pictures: Polymath, an exhibit of mathematical art by both students and faculty. More information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

Sylvester Reese passed away on May 21, 2014, at the age of 82. He was a professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY) and a member of the MAA since 1959. Reese attended Morgan State University and did his graduate work at Columbia Teacher's College. He was known for his discovery of the Universal Parabolic Constant.

Harvey Cohn passed away on May 15, 2014, at the age of 90. He was a Putnam fellow and a member of the MAA for 48 years. Cohn held faculty positions at a number of universities, including serving as department chair at the University of Arizona for nine years. He also worked for the NSA’s IDA Center for Computing Sciences. Cohn is considered a pioneer in the application of computers to mathematical problems. Significantly more information about his life and career can be found in this autobiographical article from 1995 and his obituary.

Roy Sheffield passed away on May 4, 2014, at the age of 91. He was a professor at the University of Mississippi until his retirement, and a member of the MAA for 58 years. Before joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, Sheffield worked for General Dynamics, helping develop a material to shield pilots from nuclear radiation. More information about Sheffield’s life and career, as well as a photograph, is available in this article from the University of Mississippi. His obituary is available online.

Richard BreMiller passed away on April 27, 2014, at the age of 82. He was a professor at the Ursinus College until he retired in 1994, and also taught at Episcopal Academy and at St. Joseph’s University. BreMiller was a member of the MAA since 1963. His obituary can be found here.

Billy F. Bryant passed away on April 25, 2014 at the age of 91. He was a professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University until his retirement in 1998, and he was a member of the MAA since 1949. Bryant received the Meritorious Service award from the MAA Southeastern Section in 1994. Read more about his life here.

Frances Thompson passed away on April 23, 2014, at the age of 71. She was a professor at Texas Woman’s University until her retirement in 2009, and a member of the MAA since 1991. Thompson was known for contributions to mathematics education and was the author of “Hands-On Math” books. More details information on her life and career can be found in this citation from Abilene Christian University and her obituary.

William T. Fishback, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Earlham College, passed away on March 9, 2014 at the age of 92. He was a member of the MAA since 1948. In addition to teaching at Earlham College, he taught at the University of Vermont and Ohio University and held various visiting appointments at SUNY New Paltz, Clark University, Harvard University, and Denison University. During World War II he was a staff member at the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory, a major government radar development agency. His obituary can be found here.

Eleanor Kendrick passed away on March 4, 2014, at the age of 77. She was a professor at San Jose City College until her retirement in 2011, and a member of the MAA for 34 years. Her obituary can be found here.

Lee Lorch died on February 28, 2014, at the age of 98. Lorch, a member of the MAA since 1951, received the MAA’s Yueh-Gin Gung and Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics in 2007, which honored him for "his continued dedication to inclusiveness, equity, and human rights for mathematicians, and especially his profound influence on the lives of minority and women mathematicians who have benefited from his efforts." Lorch’s life and career was remembered in an extensive article in the New York Times, as well as this remembrance. In the latter part of his career, Lorch was a professor at York University (in Canada), until he retired in 1985.

Walter T. Gregorzak passed away on January 5, 2014, at the age of 96. He was a member of the MAA for 61 years.

2013

Paul Sally passed away on December 30, 2013, at the age of 80. He was a professor at the University of Chicago and a member of the MAA since 1966. Sally was known for his contributions to harmonic analysis and his deep involvement in mathematics education. He received the MAA Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics in 2002, and the inaugural AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics in 2014 (posthumously). Extensive information about his career and impact on students of all ages were published by The University of Chicago, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe.

Arthur Dickinson passed away on December 5, 2013, at the age of 76. He was a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, and a member of the MAA since 1983. He was a member of the History of Math SIGMAA. His obituary can be found here.

Heinrich Mantel passed away on November 20, 2013, at the age of 80. Mantel was a mathematical statistician for the U.S. government, and a member of the MAA for 17 years. His obituary is available online.

Douglas Radford Shanklin passed away on November 12, 2013, at the age of 82. He was a professor at the University of Tennessee and a member of the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL). Shanklin was a professor of pathology, and he firmly believed in the collegiality of medicine, belonging to many organizations dedicated to the advancement of science and medicine. He was a member of the MAA since 1997. An extensive discussion of his career can be found on the page published by asip.org, and a citation by the MBL.

Balbir Singh died on October 24, 2013. He was a member of the MAA since 1979 and lived in California. A tribute page can be found here.

Neil G. Smith away on October 1, 2013, at the age of 75. He was a member of the MAA since 1967. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Marcia Ascher passed away on August 10, 2013, at the age of 78. She was a professor at Ithaca College and a member of the MAA since 1962. Ascher was known as a pioneer in the study of ethnomathematics, beginning with a study of Inca quipus published in the book Code of the Quipu in 1981 and as one of several case studies in her best known book Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. See also this article from Mathematics Magazine and her book Mathematics Elsewhere. Further information about Ascher’s life and career can be found in her obituary.

Harley Flanders passed away on July 26, 2013, at the age of 87. He was a member of the MAA since 1946, received the MAA's Lester R. Ford Award in 1969, and between 1966-1973 he served as Associate Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief of the MAA’s American Mathematical Monthly. During his career, he held academic positions at many universities, including Berkeley, Purdue, and Michigan. Flanders was the author of the calculus software MicroCalc, and he accepted the NCRIPTAL/EDUCOM Distinguished Software Award in 1987 and 1989. More information can be found in his obituary.

Maria Steinberg passed away on July 7, 2013, at the age of 93. She was professor emerita at California State University – Northridge, and a member of the MAA since 1951. An extensive description of Steinberg’s life and career can be found here. In addition, Steinberg’s husband Robert Steinberg was also an MAA member, and he passed away in 2014. More information about Maria Steinberg can be found in the links in her husband’s citation.

Tom Fryett passed away on July 3, 2013, at the age of 87. He worked at Boeing, United Hydraulics and Eaton Corporation. He was a member of the MAA for ten years. His obituary can be found here.

Yousef Alavi passed away on May 21, 2013, at the age of 85. Upon completing his PhD in mathematics at Michigan State University in 1958, he joined the faculty at Western Michigan University and taught for 38 years before retiring in 1996. He was a member of the MAA for 55 years. Alavi was a founding co-editor of the Michigan Section MAA Newsletter and Governor of the Section from 1977-1980 and 1986-86. He was the first winner of the Section’s Distinguished Service Award, and the first Michigan winner of the MAA Meritorious Service Award. Further information about his life and career can be found in his obituary and in a tribute from the Michigan MAA.

Seymour Kass passed away on April 12, 2013, just shy of his 87th birthday. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, and a member of the MAA since 1957. Read more about his life here.

Lyman John Wilmot passed away in April 2013, at the age of 75. He was one of the first faculty members at the College of Lake County (Illinois) and a member of the MAA since 1975. Wilmot was noted in the Daily Illini when he was an undergraduate. Read his obituary.

Mary Ellen Rudin passed away on March 18, 2013, at the age of 88. She was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a member of the MAA since 1952. Rudin was known for her influential work in topology, was a student of R. L. Moore, and was elected to the inaugural class of AMS Fellows. Prof. Rudin was the MAA Hedrick Lecturer in 1979, and served on the MAA Board of Governors as well as numerous other MAA committees. More information about her career, including links to remembrances, can be found on the MAA news page, as well as her Wikipedia page, an article in the AMS Notices, pages published by the University of St. Andrews and The Aperiodical, and a memorial resolution written by her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin. She was identified several times in the Paul R. Halmos “Who’s That Mathematician” collection (page 25, page 44, and page 46). Her husband was mathematician Walter Rudin.

Jerry Pietenpol passed away January 26, 2013, at the age of 77. Pietenpol was an associate professor at Maryville College until his retirement in 2000, and a member of the MAA for 57 years. For his work leading the computer science program at Maryville, the Jerry L. Pietenpol Computer Science Award was created. More information about his life and career can be found in this article from Maryville.

Edward “Ted” Odell passed away on January 9, 2013, at the age of 65. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a member of the MAA since 1978. He was the co-author of Number Theory Through Inquiry, published by the MAA. Information about his career can be found in this article in The Daily Texan, as well as his obituary.

Ray Ayoub passed away on January 5, 2013, at the age of 90. He was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the MAA since 1953. He received the MAA Lester R. Ford award in 1975 for his article “Euler and the zeta function” in the Monthly. He was also the editor of Musings of the Masters, published by the MAA. Ayoub served on the MAA Board of Governors for two years, and also served as associate secretary of the AMS for seven years. Ayoub was remembered in article published by voicesweb.org, and an extensive remembrance of his life and career is available here.

Charles J. Standish passed away on January 3, 2013, at the age of 86. He was a Senior Mathematician for IBM at the FSD Space Systems Center and a member of the MAA for 38 years. Information about his life and career can be found in his obituary.

2012

J. Douglas Faires passed away on December 21, 2012, at the age of 71. He was a professor at Youngstown State University and a member of the MAA since 1963. Faires was a prolific author, and among his works was the widely-used text Numerical Analysis (with R. Burden). Among the awards he received during his career was the Outstanding College-University Teacher of Mathematics by the Ohio Section of the MAA. Faires also accepted the MacDuffee Award by Pi Mu Epsilon for lifetime service in 2006, and he served a term as the PME President. Further information about his life and career can be found in this citation by the AMS and in an extensive obituary. His wife Barbara Faires is the Secretary of the MAA, and he and Barbara were inducted into the MAA’s Icosahedron Society in 2011.

David Trunnell passed away on October 12, 2012, at the age of 69. He was a professor at Xavier University, and a member of the MAA for 30 years. Trunnell was a member of the “Environment and Mathematics” committee of the MAA. His obituary can be found here.

Irving Adler passed away on September 22, 2012, at the age of 99. As described in the New York Times, Adler was "a former New York City teacher who became a prolific writer of books on math and science for young people [such as the Giant Golden Book of Mathematics] after being forced from the classroom during the Red Scare of the early 1950s." He was a member of the MAA since 1959. He was known for his work in phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves, scales, or florets in botany) and his book on the subject was reviewed by the MAA, as well as a second book on geometry. Further information about his life and career can be found on his Wikipedia page.

Sr Helen Christensen passed away on August 2, 2012, at the age of 85. She was professor emerita at Loyola University Maryland and retired in 2006. She was a member of the MAA since 1970 and a Sister of Mercy for 66 years. Christensen made lasting contributions to the Maryland-District of Columbia-Virginia Section by writing and maintaining a Section Officers Handbook and by raising the visibility of Putnam Competition students in her section. At the national level, Christensen was a member of Carriage House Advisory Board and the Committee on Department Liaisons. In addition, the Maryland-District of Columbia-Virginia Section has established the Sister Helen Christensen Service Award for outstanding service to the profession. In 2015, Christensen received the MAA’s Meritorious Service Award. Read more about her life and career in this remembrance from Loyola and her obituary.

Richard C. Metzler passed away on June 2, 2012, at the age of 74. He joined the MAA in 1962 and he was a retired professor at the University of New Mexico. His obituary can be found here.

Donald Bushaw passed away on May 8, 2012, at the age of 85. He was a professor and department chair at Washington State University. Bushaw’s PhD thesis is recognized as the beginning of modern optimal control theory. He was a member of the MAA since 1964, and received the Certificate of Meritorious Service award from the Pacific Northwest Section in 1996. A retrospective of his career is available from Washington State University, as well as a remembrance in the AMS Notices (see page 298). Read his obituary.

Charles E. Ostman passed away on March 12, 2012, at the age of 88. He was a member of the MAA who lived in Washington State. More information about his life can be found in his obituary.

Raymond William Freese, 78, passed away on March 11, 2012. He joined the MAA in 1960. Read more about his life here.

Benedict Freedman, 92, passed away on March 4, 2012. Freedman joined MAA in 1967. Read more about his life here.

Robert Owens, 90, passed away on February 28, 2012. An MAA member since 1954, read more about his life here.

Harry Rosenzweig, 72, passed away February 3, 2012. An MAA member since 1970, read more about his life here.

Bonnie Litwiller, 74, passed away January 27, 2012. An MAA member since 1962, read more about her life.

Radhika Ramamurthi passed away on January 27, 2012, at the age of 38, after a long struggle with cancer. She was a professor of mathematics at California State University San Marcos, and a member of the MAA. Ramamurthi was known for her mentoring of women in mathematics, and tributes can be found from Cal State San Marcos faculty, students, and the University of Illinois.

Myrtle Smith passed away on January 26, 2012, at the age of 87. She was a member of the MAA for 43 years. Smith taught at Southern University (LA) for 33 years and for several years at St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. More information about her life and career is available in her obituary.

Marion Wetzel, 92, passed away on January 14, 2012. An MAA member since 1952, read more about her life here.

Dorothy Heller, 91, passed away on January 13, 2012. An MAA member since 1968, read more about her life here.

H. David Lipsich, 91, passed away on January 12, 2012. An MAA member since 1943, read more about his life here (pdf).

Basil Gordon passed away on January 12, 2012, at the age of 80. He was a professor of mathematics at UCLA, and a member of the MAA since 1954. Gordon was known for his contributions to number theory, combinatorics, algebra, and applied mathematics. He was Tom Apostol's first PhD student and went on to supervise 26 doctoral students at UCLA. Gordon did significant work for the MAA’s Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library. He was remembered in the AMS Notices in this article, and further information can be found on his Wikipedia page. Read more about his life here.

Herbert Wilf passed away on January 7, 2012, at the age of 80. He was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 2008, and he was a member of the MAA since 1978. Wilf was a pioneer in discrete mathematics and in the mathematical programming of early computers. Obituaries, remembrances, a retrospective in the AMS Notices, and further information about his life and career have been collected by the University of Pennsylvania.

William Ullery, 58, passed away on January 1, 2012. An MAA member since 1980, read more about his life here.

Richard Cleveland, passed away in January 2012. He was a professor of mathematics at California State University, Sacramento and a member of the MAA for 40 years.


>In Memoriam Archive


This page provides short death notices of interest to members of the MAA. Send notices to inmemoriam@maa.org.

id: 
4054
News Date: 
Tuesday, July 24, 2018