In Memory Of ...

Murray Protter (1918-2008)
Protter, former chair of the University of California, Berkeley Department of Mathematics, died May 1 at the age of 90. Protter was chair during the early 1960s and helped bring many of the great mathematicians of the day to the department. In World War II, he worked calculating the flutter speeds of military aircraft, which at the time was a recurring problem in airplane design. In 1946 he received his Ph.D. from Brown University, then joined the faculty at Syracuse University. Protter later moved to the Institute for Advanced Study and then to Berkeley where he remained until his retirement. He was very active in the AMS, serving as treasurer from 1968 to 1972, associate treasurer from 1972 to 1976, and as longtime editor of the book reviews for the Bulletin of the AMS. Protter authored many books, including Calculus with Analytic Geometry: A First Course, written with C.B. Morrey, Jr. He was an AMS member since 1941.

Michael Golomb (1909-2008)
Golomb, professor emeritus at Purdue University, died April 9 about one month short of his 99th birthday. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1933, but was banned by the Nazis from professional employment, because he was Jewish. Golomb emigrated from Germany, first to the former Yugoslavia, and then to the United States. In 1942, he joined the mathematics faculty at Purdue University, retiring in 1975. At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998, the city of Berlin honored him and other exiled Berlin mathematicians. He was an AMS member since 1940. Purdue has posted an obituary of Golomb.

Robert Stong (1936-2008)
Stong, an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, died April 10 at the age of 71. He earned his Ph.D. in 1962 at the University of Chicago. Stong was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University from 1964 to 1966, and an assistant professor at Princeton University from 1966 to 1968. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1968 where he remained until his retirement. He was an AMS member since 1959.

Donald E. Miller (1940-2008)
Miller died April 13 at the age of 67. He was chair of the Mathematics Department at St. Mary's College, where he had taught since 1967. In a St. Mary's College press release, a colleague Mary Connolly said, "His students would all say that he challenged them and led them to levels they never thought possible...His enduring legacy will be the students whose lives he changed."

Edward Lorenz (1917-2008)
Lorenz died April 16 at the age of 90. Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems, realizing that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere could trigger vastly different and often unsuspected results. He received an AB in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1938, an AM in mathematics from Harvard University in 1940, and a ScD in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948.  In 1975 Lorenz was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was jointly awarded the Crafoord Prize in 1983 (with Henry Stommel) and received the Kyoto Prize in 1991. MIT has posted an obituary with more details.

William L. Duren, Jr. (1905-2008)
Duren died April 4 at the age of 102. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1930 and joined the faculty of Tulane University. He spent the year 1936-37 at the Institute for Advanced Study as assistant to Marston Morse on calculus of variations in the large. During World War II he served the Air Force as a civilian scientist, working in an operations analysis group based in Colorado Springs. Duren was appointed chairman at Tulane in 1947 and established its Ph.D. program. He worked through the MAA to form the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics and served as president of the MAA from 1955 to 1956. In 1955 he became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. After leaving the deanship in 1962, he helped form the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in the University's School of Engineering. Duren received the MAA Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics in 1967. After retiring in 1976, he maintained contact with mathematicians, attending the weekly seminar in operator theory at UVa until early this year, and on his 100th birthday, he gave a colloquium lecture in the mathematics department. He was an AMS member since 1930. The Washington Post has posted an obituary with more details.

Takashi Kizuka (1952-2008)
Kizuka was killed on February 6. He received his Ph.D. in 1985 from Tohoku University in Japan and was a member of the Kyushu University faculty of mathematics. Kizuka, who would have turned 56 on February 14, was an AMS member since 1999.

Robert M. Mason (1928-2008)
Mason died April 5, a little less than two months before his 80th birthday. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Toledo--the latter degree in 1951. Mason was an AMS member since 1957.

Audrey W. McMillan (1914-2008)
McMillan died January 10 at the age of 93. She received her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1935, and her Ph.D. from Radcliffe College/Harvard University in 1938. McMillan was an AMS member since 1938.

Merle Manis (1934-2008)
Manis died March 11 at the age of 73. He grew up in Montana and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1965. In his dissertation he developed what are now known as Manis valuations and Manis valuation rings. Following his graduation, he began teaching at the University of Montana, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. An obituary in the Missoulian has more information on Manis.

David Gale (1921-2008)
Gale died March 7 at the age of 86. He was professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Gale was a puzzle and game lover, inventing Bridg-It and Chomp, whose work has found many applications in economics and operation research. He and Lloyd Shapley proved that given an equal number of men and women, a solution to the stable marriage problem exists, and gave an algorithm for a solution. Gale received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1949. He taught at Princeton for one year before joining the faculty at Brown University, where he remained until 1965. Gale became a professor of mathematics and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966, and was also appointed to the economics faculty in 1967. Following his retirement he wrote a recreational mathematics column, "Mathematical Entertainments," in the Mathematical Intelligencer. Gale was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003, Gale developed an online interactive mathematics museum, MathSite, which won an Pirelli International Award in 2007. He was an AMS member since 1947. The University of California, Berkeley has posted an obituary, which includes information about donations that may be made in his memory to the David Gale Fund for Interactive Mathematics.

Gen-ichirô Sunouchi (1911-2008)
Sunouchi, a professor emeritus at Tohoku University (Japan), died March 7 at the age of 96. He received his Ph.D. from Tohoku University in 1945 and was an AMS member since 1955.

James Totten (1947-2008)
Totten died suddenly March 9 at the age of 60. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and taught at Thompson Rivers University (originally Cariboo College) in British Columbia from 1978 until his retirement in 2007. Totten was editor-in-chief of Crux Mathematicorum with Mathematical Mayhem and was a key organizer of math contests for high school students. An obituary is posted online.

Charles L. Clark (1917-2008)
Clark, professor emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles, died February 22 at the age of 90. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1944 and was an AMS member since 1940. Donations in his memory may be made to the Yosemite Fund.

Peter Szüsz (1924-2008)
Szüsz died February 16 at the age of 83 of complications following heart surgery. His principal interests were probabilistic methods in analysis and number theory, Diophantine approximation, Fourier series, and the constructive theory of functions. A survivor of the Nazi labor camps during World War II, Szüsz earned his Ph.D. from the University of Budapest and his D.Sci. from the Hungarian Academy of Science, where he was a research fellow from 1950 to 1965. He was a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) from 1966 until his retirement in 1994 and had seven Ph.D. students. An accomplished violinist, Szüsz studied for many years with Isidore Cohen and enthusiastically played chamber music (as well as bridge and chess) with his many friends. Donations in his memory may be made to the Society's Centennial Fellowship Fund. Szüsz was a member since 1966.

Belmont G. Farley (1920-2008)
Belmont Greenlee Farley, a pioneering brain researcher and computer scientist who helped develop the world's first fully-transistorized computer and, with his colleague, W.A. Clark, created the first computer simulation of a neural network, died on February 28. He received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1941. His subsequent doctoral studies in mathematics at M.I.T. were interrupted by World War II, after which he obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Yale University in 1948. He started his professional career at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1948 to 1952. Starting in 1954 at M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory, Farley and Clark conducted research on neural networks using mathematical models developed by Alan Turing. In 1964 Farley joined the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1969 he became the second member of Temple University's new Department of Computer and Information Science, where he remained until his retirement in 1986. Farley had been a member of the AMS since 1942.

Richard D. Anderson (1922-2008)
Richard D. Anderson, noted topologist, died on March 4. He received his Ph.D. at the University Texas at Austin under R.L. Moore in 1948 and was a professor at the Louisiana State University (LSU) from 1956 until his retirement in 1980. He served as vice-president of the AMS in 1972-73, and president of the MAA in 1982. Among his honors were receiving the Bolzano Medal from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science in 1981, receiving the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics by the MAA in 1978, and speaking at International Congress of Mathematicians in 1970. After he retired from LSU he became very active in mathematics education in Louisiana. He helped lay the foundation for the Louisiana Systemic Initiatives Program, a state program in which he continued as a senior adviser until his passing. Anderson joined the AMS in 1946 and remained a member and supporter of the Society.

Raymond F. Kramer, Jr. (1932-2008)
Raymond F. Kramer, Jr. died Saturday February 23, 2008 after a brief illness. Kramer was born and raised in Joliet, Illinois. He received his Masters Degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1956, and moved to California to pursue his career. After a brief period at Douglas Aircraft, he did graduate studies at UCLA. He then took a position at Space Technology Laboratories. He remained with the company as it became the Ramo-Wooldridge company (RW), TRW, and finally the Aerospace Corporation, until his retirement in 1988. During his career he developed important computer models of such things as the thermal heating of spacecraft during reentry. Specifically, he was an expert in developing models employing differential equations for computer solution. Kramer was a longtime resident of the South Bay, CA, and had been an AMS member since 1959. His family requests that in lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Raymond F. Kramer, Jr.,'s name to the American Mathematical Society's Epsilon Fund (to support talented high school students) or the Centennial Fellowship Fund (awarded to outstanding mathematicians 3-12 years after their Ph.D.).

Raoul Hailpern (1916-2008)
Hailpern died February 9 at the age of 91. He was Editorial Director of MAA Publications for more than 20 years. Hailpern received his Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, where he also became a faculty member. In 1986 Hailpern was awarded the MAA's Certificate of Merit. After his retirement from the University of Buffalo, he taught at Park School in Amherst, NY, where he continued to teach in his eighties. He was an AMS member since 1963.

James E. Householder (1916-2008)
Householder died January 23 at the age of 91. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1959. That same year he joined the faculty at Humboldt State University, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. Householder was an AMS member since 1956.

Henry R. Dowson (1939-2008)
Dowson, a research fellow at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, died January 28 at the age of 68. He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from the University of Cambridge. Dowson was an AMS member since 1967.

Herbert B. Keller (1925-2008)
Keller, who was a professor at the California Institute of Technology from 1965 to 2000, died January 26 at the age of 82. He earned his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1954. After being on the faculty at Courant he moved to Caltech. Keller served as an executive officer for applied mathematics and director of Caltech's branch of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation. He was well-known for his work in applied math and scientific computation. Keller was an AMS member since 1961. There is a blog with more information and memories of Keller.

Izaak Wirszup (1915-2008)
Wirszup died January 30 at the age of 93. He grew up in Vilnius, which is now in Lithuania but was then part of Poland. During World War II, he spent two years in concentration camps. According to an obituary in the Chicago Tribune, "He awoke one morning to find himself in the company of captured French resistance fighters, one of whom asked Dr. Wirszup how he had slept. Such basic humanity, became for Dr. Wirszup a life-altering event... ." After World War II, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago and remained associated with the University for the rest of his life. Wirszup received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955. In the 1970s he testified before Congress about the status of mathematics education in the US. He was an AMS member since 1957.

Andrew H. Wallace (1926-2008)
Wallace died January 18 at the age of 81. He was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and got his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in 1949. He came to the US in 1959, serving as professor and chair at Indiana University. In 1965 Wallace joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement. He was chair of the department from 1968 to 1971. The University of Pennsylvania has posted more about Wallace.

Roy Dubisch (1917-2008)
Dubisch died January 20, about two weeks shy of his 91st birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1943 and taught at several colleges and universities, including Fresno State, where he also served as chair, and the University of Washington. Dubisch served as editor of Mathematics Magazine and served two terms on the MAA Board of Governors. He was a member of the AMS since 1942.

Robert J. Rubin (1926-2008)
Rubin died January 18 at the age of 81. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Cornell University in 1951, and spent most of his career at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). After his retirement he continued to work as a guest researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Rubin was an AMS member since 1985. For more information, see Rubin's obituary in The Washington Post.

Joost van Hamel (1969-2008)
Van Hamel died January 12 at the age of 38. Born in Voorburg, the Netherlands, van Hamel received his Ph.D. from Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam in 1997. At the time of his death, van Hamel was a professor of mathematics at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He was an AMS member since 1996.

Robert Shepard Johnson (1928-2008)
Johnson died January 1 at the age of 79. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern University, in 1950 and 1951, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. Johnson was an AMS member since 1956.

See the 2006-2007 archive for notices of prior deaths.

Submissions about recent deaths, including the person's name, birth and death dates, and brief information about him or her, may be sent to paoffice@ams.org.