In Memory Of ...

(2008-2009)

Erich Lehmann (1917-2009)
Lehmann, a leading figure in statistics, died September 12 at the age of 91. Born in Strasbourg, France, he was raised in Frankfurt am Main. In 1933 he and his family fled the Nazis and moved to Switzerland. Lehmann entered the graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1940 and served as an operations analyst for the U.S. Air Force during World War II. After the war, in 1946, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley under the direction of Jerzy Neyman and continued teaching there until his retirement. Lehmann was the author of the significant and widely used texts, Testing Statistical Hypotheses and Theory of Point Estimation. He served as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1961), received three Guggenheim Fellowships (1955, 1966, and 1980), and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975) and the National Academy of Sciences (1978). Read more about his research and life.

Stephen W. Willard (1941-2009)
Willard, the author of the popular text General Topology, died August 7 at the age of 67. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1965 under the direction of A. H. Stone. He then held positions at Lehigh University and Case Western Reserve University. In 1969 Willard joined the faculty at the University of Alberta where he remained until his retirement. He received the Rutherford Award for Teaching Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the university in 1983.

Edgar Reich (1927-2009)
Reich, a noted researcher in the field of quasiconformal mappings, died July 6 about a month after his 82nd birthday. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1954 under the direction of Edwin Ford Beckenbach. Reich taught at the University of Minnesota from 1956 until his retirement in 2000, including serving as head of the department from 1969 to 1971. He was an AMS member since 1949.

Norman Jay Levitt (1943-2009)
Levitt, who was an energetic fighter of pseudoscience, died October 24 at the age of 66. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1967 under the direction of William Browder. Levitt taught at New York University from 1967 to 1969 and then moved to Rutgers University. He retired from Rutgers in 2007. Read more about Levitt.

George Piranian (1914-2009)
Piranian died August 31 at the age of 95. He was born in Switzerland and came to the U.S. in 1929. Piranian earned his Ph.D. from Rice Institute (now Rice University) in 1943 under the direction of Szolem Mandelbrojt. In 1945 he joined the University of Michigan's Department of Mathematics where he remained until his retirement in 1983. He became managing editor of the Michigan Mathematical Journal in 1954 and helped revive the journal. Piranian was an AMS member since 1942. Read an obituary (pdf) posted at the University of Michigan's Department of Mathematics website.

Richard G. Long (1931-2009)
Long, who taught at Lawrence University for 24 years, died December 21. He earned his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Washington under the direction of Victor Klee. Long then taught at Wesleyan University and assumed a variety of roles at the MAA--including overseeing the production of several mathematics films--before joining the faculty at Lawrence in 1969. He helped found Lawrence's computer science program and encouraged many minority students in math workshops he established. Read a rememberance in the Lawrence student newspaper.

Mary-Elizabeth Hamstrom (1927-2009)
Hamstrom, who earned a Ph.D. under the direction of R.L. Moore, died December 2 at the age of 82. She received her Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Texas and then took a job at Goucher College. In 1961 she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, where she remained until her retirement in 1999. In 1966 Hamstrom was appointed to professor and at the time was one of only four female professors in the university's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Hamstrom continued to be active in the department after her retirement. She was an AMS member since 1948. Read more about Hamstrom's life in an obituary (pdf) posted by the university's Department of Mathematics.

Jamel Kammoun (1960-2009)
Kammoun died December 20 after a car spun out of control and struck him as he was taking his morning walk. Kammoun was 49. A native of Tunisia, Kammoun was an associate professor at Marymount College in California, where he had been since 2001. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1991. Read more about Kammoun.

Edward S. Kennedy (1912-2009)
Kennedy, who was a leading expert on math and science in the medieval Islamic world, died May 4 at the age of 97. He received his Ph.D. from Lehigh University in 1939 and then joined the faculty at the University of Alabama. In World War II Kennedy served in Iran. After his service he returned to the U.S. and worked with Otto Neugebauer, founder of Mathematical Reviews®. In 1946 Kennedy became a professor at the American University of Beirut and continued to teach there until his retirement in 1976. In 2001 he was made a member of the Order of al Istiqial for his contributions to the study of Islamic culture. Kennedy was an AMS member since 1937.

J. Richard Vandevelde (1935-2009)
Vandevelde died August 11 at the age of 74. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967 and taught at Loyola University Chicago from 1969 until his retirement. During his time at Loyola, Vandevelde served as chair of the department from 1970 to 1977 and as dean of Mathematical and Natural Sciences from 1982 to 1985. He was an AMS member since 1966.

Jürgen Hurrelbrink (1944-2009)
Hurrelbrink died March 13 at the age of 64. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1970 and had eight Ph.D. students during his time at Louisiana State University, the most recent in 2004. Hurrelbrink was an AMS member since 1983.

Stefan Schwabik (1941-2009)
Stefan Schwabik passed away on November 4, 2009. He was born in Gelnica, Slovakia and received his Ph.D. at Charles University in Prague. He served on the faculty at Charles University from 1967 to 1993. His areas of interest were integration theory (Kurzweil-Henstock), ordinary differential equations, integral equations, and history of mathematics. He spoke several languages, and served on the editorial board of Mathematica Bohemica and Archivum Mathematicum, and was on the scientific board of several universities. He was a member of the AMS since 1993.

Leonard D. Berkovitz (1924-2009)
Leonard David Berkovitz died October 13, 2009. In 1941, he began his college studies as a chemistry major at the University of Chicago. When World War II started, he joined the military, completing meteorology training programs at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago, and served as a weather officer. After the war he resumed his studies at the University of Chicago, where he received a B.S. in meteorology in 1946. He entered graduate school in mathematics at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1951. His thesis, written under the direction of Antoni Zygmund, was in the area of double trigonometric series. From 1951 to 1952, he was an Atomic Energy Commission Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University; from 1952 to 1954, he was a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology: in 1954, he joined the Mathematics Division at the Rand Corporation, where he worked on the mathematical theory of games and on a variety of tactical problems for the Air Force; and in 1962, he joined the Purdue faculty as a professor, and served as head of the Mathematics Department from 1975 to 1980, and acting head from 1989-1990. He remained active in research (his fields were differential games, optimal control theory, and nonclassical variational problems), wrote textbooks and papers, and taught until his retirement in 2003. Berkovitz was a member of the AMS since 1950 and was on the editorial committee of Mathematical Reviews® from 1985 to 1991. Read the full obituary on the Purdue University website.

F. Brock Fuller (1927-2009)
Fuller, a longtime professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), died November 6 at the age of 82. He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from Princeton University, under the direction of Solomon Lefschetz. Fuller then became a research fellow at Caltech and continued on as a professor. His research involved writhing numbers and the analysis of digital recording methods. Fuller was an AMS member since 1950.

Alfred Vassalotti (1929-2009)
Vassalotti died October 21 at the age of 80. He was a member of the Hofstra University Department of Mathematics from 1961 to 1997. Vassalotti was an AMS member since 1964.

Howard Lewis Penn (1946-2009)
Penn, a professor at the United States Naval Academy, died of a heart attack November 23, two weeks after his 63rd birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1973. In 1995 Penn received the MAA's Certificate of Meritorious Service. The Navy awarded him its Meritorious Civilan Service Award in 2002 for his work in the academy's math department. He was an AMS member since 1972. The MAA has posted more information about Penn.

George J. Maltese (1931-2009)
Maltese, a scholar at Wesleyan University, died October 27 at the age of 78. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1960 and was an AMS member since 1958.

Bettina Richmond (1958-2009)
Richmond, a professor at Western Kentucky University who taught there for 23 years, died November 22 at the age of 51. She was murdered late on the night of the 22nd. She received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1985 and was an AMS member since 1979. Richmond is survived by her husband, Tom, also a member of the mathematics faculty at Western Kentucky, and two children. A news story on WTVF (Nashville) has more on Richmond's death, including reflections on her life by colleague John Spraker.

Albert E. Hurd (1931-2009)
Hurd, a former professor at the University of Victoria, died October 28 about a week after his 78th birthday. He co-authored An Introduction to Nonstandard Real Analysis (1985) with Peter A. Loeb. Hurd received his Ph.D. in 1962 from Stanford University, under the direction of H. L. Royden. He was an AMS member since 1958.

Thomas Dietmair (1961-2009)
Thomas Dietmair died September 6 at the age of 48. He received his Ph.D. at the TUM Technical University of Munich (Germany) in 1990, after which he decided on a career as an actuary. He was employed at Allianz Insurance Group before being recruited by one of the world's leading reinsurers and risk carriers, the Munich Re Group. At Munich Re headquarters he was employed until 2006, when Munich Re delegated Thomas for the following two years to ERGO Insurance Group, which is part of Munich Re. Under its umbrella, both primary insurer and reinsurer capitalize on opportunities to turn risk into value. Thomas was expected to return to Munich Re in March 2009, however at that time he was already seriously ill. Dietmair was a member of the AMS since 1992.

Marian Boykan Pour-El (1928-2009)
Pour-El died June 10 at the age of 81. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1958. Her first position was at Pennsylvania State University, followed by a visiting position at the Institute for Advanced Study where she worked with Kurt Gödel. In 1964 she moved to the University of Minnesota and retired in 2000. A symposium was held in her honor in Kyoto in 1993. Pour-El served on many AMS committees and was a member since 1953.

A. Edward Nussbaum (1925-2009)
Nussbaum died October 31 at the age of 84. He was born in Germany and just managed escaping the Nazis during World War II. Other members of his family were not so lucky, including his parents who both died at Auschwitz. After the war he came to the United States and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957. While writing his dissertation he worked with John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study, eventually co-authoring several articles with him. In 1958 Nussbaum joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, retiring in 1995. He was an AMS member since 1952. The St. Louis Jewish Light has posted an obituary.

Linda Barkley (1951-2009)
Barkley died August 15 at the age of 57. She worked in the Space and Communications Division of Hughes Aircraft, which was later acquired by Boeing Communications. An obituary in the Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter (November-December 2009) notes that "She generously volunteered her time and energy to initiatives to encourage more women to enter math-related fields." Barkley was an AMS member since 1978.

Diane Pugmire (1957-2009)
Pugmire, who had taught at Weber State University since 1984, died October 28 of complications from the H1N1 flu virus. She was 52. About two weeks before her sudden death, Pugmire had been named, along with colleague Dixie Blackinton, as Educator of the Year by the Utah Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. Weber State has posted more information.

Alvin White (1925-2009)
White died June 2, less than three weeks before his 84th birthday. White was on the faculty at Harvey Mudd College from 1962 until his retirement in 1996. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1961. For many years he was project director for the Interdisciplinary Holistic Teaching/Learning Program at the Claremont Colleges and was the founding editor of the Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal. White was an AMS member since 1960. Harvey Mudd College has posted an obituary with remembrances and more information.

Margaret M. LaSalle (1923-2009)
LaSalle died August 12, about a month after her 86th birthday. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1956 and was a faculty member at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. LaSalle was an AMS member since 1966.

Joseph Zelle (1912-2009)
Zelle died July 11 at the age of 97. He taught at several schools, including Ohio State University, Cleveland State University, and Cuyahoga Community College. A radio engineer, he was one of the first Americans to pick up signals from Sputnik. Zelle was an AMS member since 1958.

Frank S. Beckman (1921-2009)
Beckman died October 16 at the age of 88. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 from Columbia University, while working for IBM, where he worked from 1951 to 1971. He founded the computer science department at Brooklyn College in 1971 and chaired the department until 1985. Beckman then established the computer science Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center and served as its executive director until 1993. He was an AMS member since 1947.

Alan A. Meyerhoff (1926-2009)
Meyerhoff died May 18 at the age of 83. He was on the faculty at Rutgers University before retiring in 1981. Meyerhoff received his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1974, the same year he joined the AMS.

Robert L. Davis (1919-2009)
Davis, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, died October 12 at the age of 90. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1957 and was an AMS member since 1953.

Harold Hunt Johnson (1929-2009)
Johnson died September 25, five days after his 80th birthday. He served in the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War and then worked at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In 1957 he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Johnson taught at Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Washington before taking a position with the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1975 he returned to academia and joined the faculty at Trinity University in the Chicago area. Johnson retired from Trinity in 1991. He was an AMS member since 1957. An obituary is online.

Hugh Brunk (1919-2009)
Brunk died July 19, about a month before his 90th birthday. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1944, and taught at Rice, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Oregon State University. He was an AMS member since 1942.

Melvin Henriksen (1927-2009)
Henriksen died on October 14 at the age of 82. A significant portion of his career was spent at Harvey Mudd College, where he served as professor from 1969 to 1997. Henriksen earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1951, and taught at the University of Alabama, Wayne State University, Purdue University, and Case Western Reserve University before moving to Harvey Mudd College. He did pioneering work on rings of continuous functions. Henriksen was an AMS member since 1950. Harvey Mudd College has posted more information.

Klaus Dieter Bierstedt (1945-2009)
Bierstedt died May 23 about three weeks after his 64th birthday. In addition to publishing 57 articles, Bierstedt organized several international conferences in his career. He received his doctorate in 1971 from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. In 1974 he joined the faculty at the University of Paderborn, where he spent his career. Bierstedt was an AMS member since 1973. A memorial piece (pdf) written by Jose Bonét and Reinhold Meise has more information.

I.M. Gelfand (1913-2009)
Gelfand, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, died October 5 at the age of 96. He was the author of more than 800 articles and 30 books in many areas of mathematics--including commutative normed rings, representation theory, generalized functions, and partial differential equations--and in theoretical biology. Gelfand was born in the Ukraine and received his Ph.D. in 1935 from Moscow State University under the direction of Andrei Kolmogorov. Five years later he received his D.Sc., also from Moscow State University. He was professor at Moscow State University from 1941 until 1990 at which time Gelfand joined the faculty at Rutgers University. During his lifetime he received many awards, among them the State Prize of the USSR (1953), the Lenin Prize (1956), the Wolf Prize (1978), the Kyoto Prize (1989), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1994). In 2005 he received the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the AMS for his "profound influence on many fields of research through his own work and through his interactions with other mathematicians, including students." In his response, Gelfand wrote, "Mathematics for me is a universal and adequate language of sciences, and it is an example of how people of different cultures and backgrounds can communicate and work together. This is extremely important in our times." He was an AMS member since 1964. Read more about Gelfand's work in the 2005 Steele Prize citation (pdf) in the April 2005 Notices (pages 441-442) and in his MacTutor biography.

Alice T. Schafer (1915-2009)
Alice T. Schafer, 94, of Lexington, MA, died September 27. She left behind her beloved husband of 67 years, Richard D. Schafer, sons John D. Schafer and Richard S. Schafer, grandchildren Scott D. Schafer, Tania Murray and Stephanie Altavilla, and great-grandchildren Mikayla and Grant Murray. Born in Richmond, VA, Alice Schafer was orphaned early, and was raised by two sisters. In 1936 she received an A.B. degree from Westhampton College of the University of Richmond, which awarded her an honorary D.Sc. degree in 1964. In 1940 she received an M.S. degree and in 1942 a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Schafer taught mathematics at several colleges, principally at Connecticut College, and then at Wellesley College, where she retired in 1980 as the Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics. Following her retirement she continued to teach, at Simmons College and then at Marymount University in Arlington, VA, until she was 81 years old. She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, which later named its annual prize for the outstanding undergraduate woman majoring in mathematics the Alice T. Schafer Prize. She led delegations to China for People to People, and was active in the AMS, the MAA (which in 1988 granted her its annual award for distinguished service to mathematics), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Phi Beta Kappa, and other professional associations. She was a member of the AMS since 1941. In accordance with her wishes there will be no funeral or memorial service. An obituary, "Alice Schafer, 94; math professor breached social barriers," by Emma Stickgold, was published in the Boston Globe, November 2, 2009.

Sam Perlis (1913-2009)
Perlis, professor emeritus at Purdue University, died June 22 at the age of 96. He earned all three of his degrees at the University of Chicago, including his Ph.D. which he received in 1938. Perlis then taught at the University of Michigan and the Illinois Institute of Technology. In World War II he worked for Lockheed. Following the war, in 1946, he joined the faculty at Purdue University, retiring in 1983. Perlis was the author of Theory of Matrices, which was published in 1952. He was an AMS member since 1938. Purdue's Department of Mathematics has more information.

James O. Brooks (1930-2009)
Brooks, a former professor at Villanova University, died September 12 at the age of 79. He received his Ph.D in 1963 from the University of Michigan. Brooks joined the faculty at Villanova in 1965, teaching full-time until 1994 and part-time for three years after that. He served as chair of the department from 1968 to 1977. From 1969 to 1995 Brooks served as the regional coordinator in Pennsylvania for the American Mathematics Competition. He was an AMS member since 1956. An obituary published in The Philadelphia Inquirer has more information.

Gary S. Bloom (1940-2009)
Bloom died September 6 at the age of 69. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1975. Bloom was a member of the computer science department at the City College of New York, and was an AMS member since 1980. An obituary in The New York Times has more information.

Pierre Samuel (1921-2009)
Samuel, an important member of the Bourbaki group, died August 23, less than a month before his 88th birthday. Born in Paris, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1947 under the direction of Oscar Zariski. Samuel authored several first-rate texts, and may be best known for the two-volume Commutative Algebra, which he co-authored with Zariski. In 1961 he was appointed professor at Université Paris-Sud XI-Orsay. Samuel was also an environmental activist, chairing Les Amis de la Terre, the French branch of Friends of the Earth, from 1982 to 1989. He was an AMS member since 1946. The MacTutor site has more information on his life.

Chuan C. Hsiung (1915-2009)
Hsiung died May 6 at the age of 94. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1948 and was a long-time professor at Lehigh University. Hsiung was the founding editor of the Journal of Differential Geometry. Pictures of a celebration simultaneously commemorating the journal's 30th anniversary and his 80th birthday are online. He was an AMS member since 1946.

Tetsuro Miyakawa (1948-2009)
Miyakawa died February 11, less than a month before his 61st birthday. He received his Ph.D. from Hiroshima University in 1981. Miyakawa authored or co-authored over 50 articles on fluid mechanics, especially regarding the Navier-Stokes equations.

Frederick Norman Webb (1944-2009)
Webb died July 12, 10 days before his 65th birthday. He was a computer scientist whose undergraduate degree, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in math. Webb joined the AMS in 2001.

John H. Ursell (1938-2009)
Ursell died July 30 at the age of 71. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (UK) in 1963 and was an AMS member since 1985. An article in the Kingston Whig Standard, "He was a bookseller's friend," written by Rose DeShaw offers a glimpse into Ursell's life.

Charles M. Chambers (1941-2009)
Chambers died May 20 at the age of 67. He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from the University of Alabama, just two years after getting his undergraduate degree. He was an AMS member since 1967.

Peter Seibert (1927-2009)
Seibert passed away in Mexico City on August 13. He was born in Munich, Germany. He received a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Munich in 1950, with a major in mathematics and minors in physics and philosophy. He held academic and research positions in the U.S., Mexico, Chile and Venezuela, and had been a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico since 1987. He had first specialized in complex function theory, with emphasis on Riemann surfaces, and later the theory of dynamical systems, working on problems related to stability. Seibert invented a method for reducing the stability problem of a composed system to the corresponding problem for the subsystems, using a threshold principle; the results have had important applications in control theory, where the stabilization of nonlinear systems is concerned. Together with his collaborators and students, he developed two theories of bifurcation in dynamical systems, and also contributed to modern mathematical conceptualization and notation. Read more from a remembrance of Seibert and his work.

Sheldon E. Elliott (1925-2009)
Elliott was born July 9, 1925, in Asuncion, Paraguay, to Dr. Arthur E. and Ivy F. Elliott, who were serving as missionaries for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). After an early childhood in Paraguay, his family moved to Enid, Oklahoma, where he completed high school and one year at Phillips University before entering the Army Air Corps in June of 1943, where he served as a navigator on Crew 51. After the war, he returned to Phillips University and graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Chemistry. He married his Phillips classmate, Dorothy Trueblood, and continued his studies in graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he completed his Master's degree in Mathematics in 1949. He began his long career at Phillips Petroleum Company in 1951 in the Research and Development Department, and remained there for over 34 years until his retirement in 1985. Read the Crew 51 obituary.

Albert Deal (1937-2009)
Deal died August 1, less than a month before his 72nd birthday. He was a long-time member of the faculty at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), from 1962 until his retirement in 2003. Deal received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1965. When VMI added computer science to the math department, he went back to school and earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Virginia in 1988. Deal was awarded VMI's Achievement Medal upon his retirement. The Rockbridge Weekly and Alleghany Journal has posted an obituary with more information.

Takayuki Tamura (1919-2009)
Tamura, a leading figure in semigroup theory, died June 1, about three months after his 90th birthday. He was professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. Tamura received his D.Sc. from the Osaka Imperial University in Japan in 1958. In 1960 he and his family came to the United States to join the faculty at UC Davis. Howard B. Hamilton and Thomas E. Nordahl have written "Tribute for Takayuki Tamura on his 90th birthday," now available on the Semigroup Forum website. The article contains a list of Tamura's 167 publications. He was an AMS member since 1958.

David Meronk (1934-2009)
Meronk, professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, died July 30 at the age of 74. Meronk served in the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War. Meronk was hired at Bowling Green State University in 1967, where he taught until his retirement in 1995. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1969. Meronk joined the AMS in 1992. An obituary in The (Toledo) Blade has more information.

Harold P. Edmundson (1921-2009)
Edmundson died July 9 at the age of 87. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, working on breaking codes and ciphers in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1953, the same year he became an AMS member. Edmundson worked at NSA and for the Rand Corporation and other firms in the 1950s and 60s. In 1967, he moved to the University of Maryland, where he held joint appointments in mathematics and computer science. Edmundson retired in 1991 and moved to Estes Park, Colorado.

Alberto Dou (1915-2009)
Dou, professor emeritus at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, died April 18 at the age of 93. He published many research articles and was a member of several scientific societies. He served as president of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society from 1960 to 1963. Dou received his Ph.D. from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1961. He retired from the university in 1985. Dou was an AMS member since 1959.

Robert Liebler (1944-2009)
Liebler, a professor at Colorado State University, died the weekend of July 18. He was 64. He had been hiking in the San Jacinto Mountains in California and was reported missing on Saturday, July 18. His body was discovered the next day. Liebler received his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Michigan. He had been at Colorado State since 1971. Liebler was an AMS member since 1969.

James Huckaba (1936-2009)
Huckaba died March 10 at the age of 73. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Iowa. That same year he joined the faculty at the University of Missouri, where he spent his academic career, retiring in 2000. A Facebook entry indicates how people felt about Huckaba: Four of his grand nieces and nephews, ages 5 to 10, contributed $40 to the memorial scholarship fund in his name, and wrote, "Uncle Jim knew we all loved him very much. This may not be a lot of money, but it will help to keep Uncle Jim's memory alive for other students to learn and be like Uncle Jim." Huckaba was an active AMS member, joining in 1963. The Columbia Tribune obituary has more information.

Stanley J. Bezuszka, SJ (1914-2008)
Bezuszka, who had a long and distinguished career in mathematics education, died December 27, one month before his 95th birthday. At the time of his death he was the longest-serving faculty member at Boston College, having come to the college in 1939. Bezuszka was born in Poland and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1953. Bezuszka was the founding director of the Boston College Mathematics Institute, a position he held when he died. Among the many awards he received are the Glenn Gilbert National Leadership Award in Mathematics Education from the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Teaching from the Mathematics Education Trust Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and induction as a founding member into the Massachusetts Hall of Fame for Mathematics Educators. In addition, the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in New England has created the Fr. Stanley J. Bezuszka Heart and Mind Mathematics Award, and the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Massachusetts has created the Fr. Stanley J. Bezuszka Achievement Award for Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Bezuszka was an AMS member since 1954. Boston College has posted a webpage with more information.

Kathleen "Kay" Butcher Whitehead (1920-2009)
Whitehead died April 18 at the age of 88. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1946, specializing in topology. Whitehead held positions at Wellesley College, Brown University, Smith College, and Boston University before joining the mathematics department at Tufts University in 1960. In addition to her teaching duties at Tufts, she also served as undergraduate coordinator. Whitehead retired in 1985, at the same time as her husband George Whitehead, who died in 2004. She was an AMS member since 1943. The Department of Mathematics at Tufts has posted more information.

Theresa Phillips Vaughan (1941-2009)
Vaughan, professor emerita of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), died on June 13 at the age of 67. Vaughan received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1972 under the direction of Leonard Carlitz. Her research covered a wide range of topics in algebra, combinatorics, and discrete mathematics. She was a member of the AMS since 1972. UNCG's Department of Mathematics and Statistics has a website with more information.

Klaus Fischer (1943-2009)
Fischer, chair at George Mason University, died July 2 of complications due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease. Fischer was 65. He was born in Zwickau, Germany, and came to the U.S. with his family when he was nine. Fischer received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1973 and then joined the faculty at George Mason. He was very active in the MATHCOUNTS competition for middle school students. Fischer once bicycled across the country in 30 days, carrying water from the Pacific Ocean which at the end of his trip he deposited in the Atlantic Ocean. He continued to bike to work until a short time before his death. Fischer was an AMS member since 1969. George Mason has posted more information.

Charles Edward Aull (1927-2009)
Aull, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech, died July 4 at the age of 81. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1962, then taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Kent State University. In 1965 Aull joined the faculty at Virginia Tech, where he taught until his retirement in 1992.

Charles T. Molloy (1914-2009)
Molloy died May 5 at the age of 94. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1948 and was an AMS member since 1951.

John Wells Brace (1926-2008)
John Wells Brace, 82, passed away Dec. 26, 2008. Brace was raised in Jamestown, N.Y. He received his bachelor's degree in 1949 from Swarthmore; his master's degree in 1951 and his doctorate in 1953, both from Cornell. John married Patricia Adams Demarest, June 16, 1950. Together they had five children. Brace served as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland from 1953 to 1988. He specialized in functional analysis, and was famous for his Tuesday night seminars, from 1957 to 1987, held in the basement of his house in Beltsville, Md. In 1966 he gave a lecture at the ICM in Moscow. Brace joined the AMS in 1951. Read more about Brace, and his career, family and hobby of building large-scale model railroads and steam locomotives. Memorial contributions may be made to the John W. Brace Scholarship Fund, P.O. Box 177, Cherryfield, ME 04622.

George Handelman (1921-2008)
Handelman died September 13 at the age of 87. He received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1946 and later joined the faculty at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In 1955 he moved to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he served as department chair from 1960 to 1972 and as dean of the School of Science from 1972 to 1978. He was Amos Eaton Professor of Mathematics from 1978 until his retirement. Handelman was very active in activities of SIAM and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and was an AMS member since 1944. SIAM has posted remembrances of Handelman written by two of its former presidents, Robert E. O'Malley, Jr. and Hirsh Cohen.

Henry S. Lieberman (1940-2009)
Lieberman died May 14. He was 68. Lieberman received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 and his master's degree from Brandeis University in 1964. He taught briefly at Wellesley College and then worked for many years as an actuary at John Hancock and for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Lieberman was an AMS member since 1967.

Leonard Gillman (1917-2009)
Gillman died April 7 at the age of 92. He was treasurer of the MAA from 1973 to 1986 and president of the MAA from 1987 to 1988. In addition to being elected to those offices, he served on many committees for both the MAA and AMS. Gillman received his Ph.D. in 1953 from Columbia University. He taught at Tufts (then a college), Purdue University, the University of Rochester--where he was chair from 1960 to 1969--and the University of Texas at Austin, serving as chair from 1969 to 1973. He retired from the university in 1987. Besides being an accomplished mathematician, Gillman was also known for his musical talents, being a great pianist and conducting nearly 2000 mathematicians in the singing of "Happy Birthday" at the AMS's Centennial Banquet in 1988. He was an AMS member since 1942. The MAA has posted an obituary with links to more information.

Wray G. Brady (1918-2008)
Brady died November 17 at the age of 90. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1951 and was an AMS member since 1947.

Liliana Pavel (1955-2009)
Pavel, an associate professor at the University of Bucharest (Romania) died February 7, at the age of 53. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest in 1985 and was an AMS member since 1999.

Alberto Dou (1915-2009)
Dou, a member of the faculty at the University of Barcelona in Spain, died April 18. He was 93. Dou received his Ph.D. in 1953 from the University of Madrid and was an AMS member since 1959.

John Dauns (1937-2009)
Dauns, who was born Jani Drinks in Latvia, died June 4, a week before his 72nd birthday. His family immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 and he changed his name after becoming a U.S. citizen. Dauns received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964, under the direction of David Widder. He then joined the faculty at Tulane University, where he taught until his death. He was the author or co-author of several books on rings and modules. Dauns was an AMS member since 1964.

Rajeev Motwani (1962-2009)
Motwani, a mentor for the founders of Google and other Silicone Valley entrepreneurs, died June 5 at the age of 47. He was a professor of computer science at Stanford University who was recognized for his research in randomized algorithms. Motwani won the Gödel Prize in 2001. The June 9 edition of The New York Times contains his obituary.

Charles J.A. Halberg, Jr. (1921-2009)
Halberg, professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), died June 1. He was 87. Halberg received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1955. He then joined the faculty at UCR and helped establish the mathematics department. Throughout his career at the university, he was very active in campus affairs. The university has posted more information.

Charles Ballantine (1929-2008)
Ballantine, professor emeritus at Oregon State University, died December 23 at the age of 79. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1959 under the direction of Charles Loewner, and was an AMS member since 1954.

Harry Hochstadt (1925-2009)
Hochstadt died May 4 at the age of 83. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1956 under the direction of Wilhelm Magnus. Hochstadt was head of the math department at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (later Polytechnic University and now Polytechnic Institute of New York University) from 1963 to 1990. He authored books on differential equations, integral equations, and functions of mathematical physics, as well as over 70 research papers. Hochstadt was an AMS member since 1954.

Richard Good (1917-2008)
Good, a longtime member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, died November 24, two months after his 91st birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1945. Good was very active in Pi Mu Epsilon, serving as Secretary-Treasurer (1975-1987) and as Councillor (1987-1993). He retired from the University of Maryland in 1988. Good was an AMS member since 1941. Pi Mu Epsilon has posted a remembrance.

Almir Olímpio Alves (1965-2009)
Alves, a visiting scholar at Binghamton University, was one of 13 victims of the shootings at Binghamton's American Civic Association on April 3. He was 43. Alves received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil and then joined the faculty at the university. The Binghamton University Department of Mathematical Sciences has a webpage with more information on Alves.

Frederik "Ferry" de Jong (1955-2009)
De Jong died April 8 at the age of 53. He grew up in the Netherlands and emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. In 1985 he received his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Cornell University. De Jong worked as a research scientist at Scientific Research Associates and as a senior engineer at Pratt & Whitney. He was an AMS member since 1985.

Mavina Vamanamurthy (1934-2009)
Vamanamurthy died April 6 at the age of 74. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969 under the direction of Frederick Gehring. He taught at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) from 1971 to 2000. In 1996, Vamanamurthy, who published more than 90 research papers, was given the Award for Research Excellence by the New Zealand Mathematical Society. He was an AMS member since 1968. The University of Auckland's Department of Mathematics has posted more information on Vamanamurthy.

Allen Ziebur (1923-2009)
Ziebur died April 1, one month before his 86th birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1950. Ziebur taught at what is now Binghamton University, serving as chair of the department from 1964 to 1967. He was an AMS member since 1949.

Virginia Rohde (1918-2008)
Rohde died December 5 at the age of 90. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1950. Rohde was a member of the faculty at Mississippi State University and was an AMS member since 1950.

John R. Knudsen (1916-2009)
Knudsen died February 6 at the age of 92. He received his Ph.D. in 1951 from New York University and was an AMS member since 1959.

Claude Burrill (1925-2008)
Burrill died October 20 at the age of 83. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1952. During his career he worked at New York University, Bell Labs, IBM's Systems Research Institute, and the University of Iowa. He also served on William Paterson College's Board of Trustees, including a time as the college's acting president. He was an AMS member since 1953.

Paul Rotter (1918-2009)
Rotter died February 24, three days after his 91st birthday. He was an AMS member since 1949.

Irving John "Jack" Good (1916-2009)
Good, who worked at Bletchley Park in World War II and helped develop Bayesian inference, died April 5 at the age of 92. He attended the University of Cambridge (UK), earning a Smith's Prize in mathematics in 1940 and his Ph.D. in 1941, under the direction of G.H. Hardy. During World War II, Good worked with Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander, and Max Newman to break the German Enigma code. After the war, he held positions at the University of Manchester and Trinity College, Oxford. In 1967 Good moved to the U.S., joining the statistics faculty at Virginia Tech, and becoming University Distinguished Professor in 1969. He retired in 1994. Good published in many areas, including statistics, number theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He helped popularize the game of Go in Britain and advised Stanley Kubrick on the computer HAL for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1985 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Good was an AMS member since 1969. The Virginia Tech website has more information.

Richard A. Hunt (1937-2009)
Hunt, professor emeritus at Purdue University, died March 22 at the age of 71. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 from Washington University, and won the Salem Prize in 1969. Besides teaching at Purdue University, he also taught at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Purdue in 1969 and retired in 2000. Purdue's Department of Mathematics has posted an obituary with more information.

Charalambos D. Aliprantis (1946-2009)
Aliprantis, a professor of economics and mathematics at Purdue University, died February 27. He was 62. Aliprantis received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1973 and was an AMS member since 1972. An obituary with more information is online.

Bruce Meserve (1917-2008)
Meserve, a former professor at the University of Vermont, died November 14 at the age of 91. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1947 and was an AMS member since 1942.

Lazar Dragos (1930-2009)
Dragos died April 2 at the age of 78. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest in 1964 and was affiliated with that university at the time of his death. Dragos was a member of the Romanian Academy and was an AMS member since 1995.

Michael O. Albertson (1946-2009)
Albertson died March 21 of thyroid cancer at the age of 62. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 under the direction of Herbert S. Wilf. For 37 years he taught at Smith College where he was L. Clark Seelye Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science (founding member of the department). He was the author of over 70 research articles in graph theory and the college textbook, Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms. More information is online. Albertson was an AMS member since 1969.

William Transue (1914-2009)
Transue died February 3 at the age of 94. He received his Ph.D. from Lehigh University in 1941, then spent a year as an assistant to Marston Morse at the Institute for Advanced Study. Morse and Transue eventually published 20 papers together. In 1966, Transue joined the faculty at what is now called Binghamton University. He retired from Binghamton in 1983. More details on Transue's career have been posted on Binghamton's site. Transue was an AMS member since 1939.

Edward D. Gaughan (1931-2009)
Gaughan died March 6 about a month after his 78th birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1960. Gaughan then joined the faculty at New Mexico State University where he remained until his retirement in 1991. He was the author of many college math textbooks, including the AMS book, Introduction to Analysis. He was a member of the AMS since 1959.

John W. "Jack" Wrench, Jr. (1911-2009)
Wrench died February 27 at the age of 97. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1938. Wrench was a pioneer of high-precision computation using computers. In 1961, he and Daniel Shanks (1917-1996) became the first to compute pi to 100,000 decimal places. The Washington Post published an obituary with more information. Wrench was an AMS member since 1936.

Jacob T. Schwartz (1930-2009)
Schwartz, who founded the computer science department at New York University's Courant Institute and did research in diverse fields, died March 2 at the age of 79. His most important publication was Linear Operators written with his advisor Nelson Dunford when Schwartz was a graduate student at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1951. During the 1960s, Schwartz became involved in computer science. One of his accomplishments was the development of SETL, a language based on the theory of sets. In the 1970s Schwartz designed Ultracomputer, an early parallel computer. Later he did research in robotics and biology. He was a professor at the Courant Institute for 42 years, serving as chairman of the computer science department from 1964 to 1980. Schwartz was an AMS member since 1947. An obituary in The New York Times has more information.

Keith Worsley (1951-2009)
Worsley died February 27 at the age of 57. He was a world leader in the geometry of random images in astrophysics and brain mapping. At the time of his death, Worsley was a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago and the James McGill Professor of Statistics at McGill University. He received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Auckland University in New Zealand. During his career Worsley received the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada, a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Edmund Hlawka (1916-2009)
Hlawka, an acclaimed Austrian mathematician, died February 19 at the age of 92. He was a major influence in number theory in the 20th century, who did groundbreaking work in analytic number theory. Hlawka received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna (Universität Wien) in 1938. Most of his research was done at Vienna University of Technology (Technische Universität Wien), but he was also a visiting professor at the Sorbonne and at Princeton University.

Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (1929-2009)
Piatetski-Shapiro, an extraordinary scientist-refusenik from the Soviet Union, died on February 21 in Tel Aviv (Israel), about a month before his 80th birthday. During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science--in areas ranging from cell biology, geophysics, automata, and homogeneous networks, to digital computers--as well as theoretical mathematics. In the last forty years Piatetski-Shapiro's research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry. His main impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions. He was the recipient of many prizes, including the Wolf Prize in 1990, and continued to perform research at the highest level until the end of his life in spite of a deteriorating condition that left him severely handicapped and often deprived him of speech. Even when he could barely move, he traveled the world, attending conferences in order to exchange thoughts with colleagues about their latest researches.

Piatetski-Shapiro received his Ph.D. in 1954 from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Later that year he received the Doctor of Sciences degree from the Steklov Institute. In 1973, during a time of growing emigration of Soviet Jews, Piatetski-Shapiro arranged exit visas for his wife and son. The next year he applied for an exit visa to Israel and as a result lost access to mathematical libraries and other academic resources. His plight attracted much attention in the U.S. and finally in 1976 he obtained his visa and immigrated to Israel. Beginning in 1977 he divided his time between Tel Aviv University and Yale University. A more extensive obituary, from which this account is taken, written by former AMS President and Yale Professor Emeritus Dan Mostow, is online. Piatetski-Shapiro was an AMS member since 1984.

William O.J. Moser (1927-2009)
Moser, professor emeritus at McGill University, died January 28 at the age of 81. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Toronto, under the direction of Donald Coxeter. Moser taught at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Manitoba before joining the faculty at McGill University. He published over 40 papers and was co-author with Coxeter of the book Generators and Relations for Discrete Groups. In 2003, Moser received the Canadian Mathematical Society's Distinguished Service Award. He was an AMS member since 1951.

Sidney James Drouilhet II (1949-2009)
Drouilhet, known to colleagues as Jim, died January 23 at the age of 59. He earned his degrees at Rice University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1974. Drouilhet then taught at the University of Texas, the University of Utah, and Yankton College before joining the faculty at Moorhead State University (now Minnesota State University Moorhead) in 1981. He was a professor there at the time of his death. Drouilhet was an AMS member since 1973. An obituary in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead has more information.

Ki Hang Kim (1936-2009)
Kim died January 15 at the age of 72. He was head of the mathematics department at Alabama State University for 35 years, retiring in 2007. In 1996 he was honored for his accomplishments by Alabama Governor Fob James, Jr.

Charles Christenson (1936-2008)
Christenson, a professor at the University of Idaho for 35 years, died September 20 shortly after his 72nd birthday. He received his Ph.D. from New Mexico State University in 1964. Christenson founded the Boron Scholarship Fund to provide scholarships to Asian students in mathematics. Following his retirement from the University of Idaho he tutored for 10 years in the university's math lab. He was an AMS member since 1965.

Jack Ohm (1932-2008)
Ohm died May 24 at the age of 75. He received his Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of California, Berkeley. Ohm was a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he supervised one Ph.D. student, and at Louisiana State University, where he supervised eight Ph.D. students. He was an AMS member since 1957.

Nicholas Reingold (1960-2008)
Reingold died July 3 at the age of 47. As a graduate student at Yale University, he was co-author of "PP Is Closed under Intersection," a significant paper in computational complexity. Reingold worked for AT&T, where he was employed at the time of his death.

Alexander "Stowell" Elder (1915-2008)
Elder died December 31 at the age of 93. He served in the Pacific in World War II and spent most of his career in the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Labs at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. From 1958 to 1961 he taught math at Harford College in Bel Air, MD. Last year Elder received a 50-year membership award from the MAA. He continued writing on local stresses in an elastic solid until his death. Elder was an AMS member since 1960.

A.O.L. (Oliver) Atkin (1925-2008)
Atkin, a noted number theorist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, died December 28 at the age of 83. He is especially well-known for his 1970 paper with J. Lehner, "Hecke Operators on Γ₀(m)" (Math. Annalen vol. 185). As a result of that paper, Atkin's name is attached to the important U-operator in the Hecke Theory of modular forms. He continued this work with Winnie Li in subsequent papers. Atkin is also known as a pioneer in the application of computers to mathematics. He made a number of early observations about congruences among modular forms that were fundamental in the later development of the theory of p-adic modular forms, did important work on partitions, and was known for the SEA (Schoof-Elkies-Atkins) algorithm in cryptography. He was born in England and worked at Bletchley Park in World War II. Following the war, he completed his doctorate at Cambridge in 1952. In 1970 he moved to the U.S. and joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (now the University of Illinois at Chicago) in 1972. Atkin remained mathematically active until his death, working on problems about modular forms for non-congruence subgroups. For more information on his work and his influence, see Computational Perspectives on Number Theory: Proceedings of a Conference in Honor of A.O.L. Atkin, edited by Duncan A. Buell and Jeremy T. Teitelbaum, 1998.

John Stallings (1935-2008)
Stallings, known for his contributions to geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology, died November 24 at the age of 73. He was professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for over 40 years. The university has posted an obituary and the December issue of Notices of the AMS has remembrances from friends and colleagues (pdf). Stallings received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959. The next year he proved the Poincaré Conjecture in dimensions greater than six. In 1963, Stallings constructed the Stallings group, a key example in the study of homological finiteness properties of groups. His most well-known theorem may be the algebraic characterization of groups with more than one end. Stallings received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the AMS in 1970. That same year he delivered an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice (France). Stallings was an AMS member since 1972. A Wikipedia page has more information, and read his obituary in the New York Times by Kenneth Chang, January 18, 2009.

Hendrik Konijn (1918-2008)
Konijn, retired professor of statistics, died October 14 at the age of 90. He helped create the department of statistics at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, where he taught from 1966 until his retirement in 1985. Konijn also taught at the University of California, Berkeley--where he earned his Ph.D. in 1954--the University of Sydney (Australia), Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and the Graduate Division of the City University of New York. Born in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Konijn immigrated to the United States in 1939. During World War II he received a commendation from the Office of Strategic Services for his work optimizing routes for military ships in the North Atlantic, which saved time and lives. Konijn was an AMS member since 1947.

Antonio Aizpuru (1954-2008)
Aizpuru died March 1. He received his Ph.D. from the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain in 1986 and was a faculty member at the University of Cádiz. Aizpuru was an AMS member since 1998.

David Middleton (1920-2008)
Middleton, a pioneer in statistical communication theory, died November 16 at the age of 88. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947, under the direction of future Nobel Prize winner (in physics) J. H. Van Vleck. Middleton was an AMS member since 1971.

David Gottlieb (1944-2008)
Gottlieb, Ford Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, died December 6 at the age of 64. He received his Ph.D. degree from Tel Aviv University in 1972, then worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the NASA Langley Research Center, and Tel Aviv University before joining the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown in 1985. Gottlieb was the author of two books and over 125 scientific articles and was best known for his fundamental contributions to the development of high order spectral methods. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and gave the John von Neumann Lecture at last summer's annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Gottlieb was an AMS member since 1989.

Beno Eckmann (1917-2008)
Eckmann, professor emeritus of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, died on November 25 at the age of 91. Eckmann was born in 1917 in Bern (Switzerland), and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the ETH Zurich in 1942, under the direction of Heinz Hopf. From 1942 to 1948 Eckmann was an associate professor in Lausanne and then became a full professor at the ETH Zurich, where he remained until his retirement in 1984. In 1964 he founded at the ETH the Forschungsinstitut für Mathematik and was its director for 20 years. He directed 60 Ph.D. theses and visited many mathematical centers worldwide (among them the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley). He was a member of the Swiss National Research Council from 1972 to 1984. Eckmann's fields of research were topology, homological algebra and group theory, and differential geometry. He had 122 papers listed in MathSciNet, and 64 of these were collected and published in a volume of Selecta (edited and with a foreword by Max-Albert Knus, Guido Mislin, and Urs Stammbach, Springer-Verlag, 1987). Among Eckmann's honors are: the Silver Medal ETH 1942, the Prix Mondial Nessim Habif (1969), and honorary doctorates from the Université de Fribourg (1964), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (1969), Israel Institute of Technology Haifa (1983), and Ben Gurion University Beer Sheva (2004). He was a member of Academia Europaea and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. He served as President of the Swiss Mathematical Society (1961-62), Secretary of the International Mathematical Union (1956-61), and Honorary President of the International Congress of Mathematicians Zurich 1994. He was an AMS member since 1947. More information is available in the MacTutor biography for Eckmann.

Susan Williamson (1936-2008)
Williamson, professor emeritus at Regis College in Massachusetts, died July 26 at the age of 71. She received her Ph.D. in 1963 from Brandeis University, under the direction of Maurice Auslander. Williamson was an AMS member since 1967.

Kiyoshi Itô (1915-2008)
Itô, a pioneer in probability theory and professor emeritus at Kyoto University (Japan), died on November 10, at the age of 93. Itô's work has had a profound influence on the development of probability theory and has been applied across a wide range of areas. It centers on the study of random processes revolving around Brownian motion, which can be seen in phenomena as varied as the diffusion of pollen in water and the fluctuation of stock prices. His achievements are even more impressive because he did much of his groundbreaking work in the isolation of Japan during World War II and was unaware of many spectacular developments taking place in probability theory, some of which could have facilitated his work. Itô's techniques proved extremely useful in the study of stochastic differential equations and diffusion equations, leading to widespread applications in biology, electrical engineering, chemical reactions, quantum physics, and other areas. The most famous development coming out of the work of Itô may be in finance, namely, the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options. Itô obtained his D.Sc. from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1945. In 1952, he became a professor at Kyoto University, where he remained until his retirement in 1979. He also served as director of the Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University from 1976 to 1979. After retirement from Kyoto University he took a position at Gakushin University and retired from there in 1985. Itô received some of Japan's highest honors, including the Medal of Culture of Japan, awarded three weeks before his death. He also received the Wolf Prize (1987), the Kyoto Prize (1998), and the inaugural Gauss Prize (2006). For more about the work of Itô, see "2006 Gauss Prize" (AMS Notices, November 2006), "The Work of Kiyosi Itô", by Philip Protter (AMS Notices, June/July 2007), and his biography at the MacTutor website. Itô was an AMS member since 1955.

George Pimbley (1922-2008)
Pimbley died August 14 at the age of 86. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and was on the USS Franklin when it was bombed. Pimbley received his Ph.D. in 1957 from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences under the direction of Peter Lax. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, retiring in 1987. Pimbley was an AMS member since 1958.

Katsumi Nomizu (1924-2008)
Nomizu, Florence Pirce Grant University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, died November 5 about a month before his 84th birthday. Nomizu published over 80 research papers and five texts, including  Foundations of Differential Geometry, which he co-authored with Shoshichi Kobayashi. He was born in Osaka (Japan) and attended Columbia University on a U.S. Army-Fulbright scholarship. In 1953 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the direction of Shiing-Shen Chern. Nomizu also received an Sc.D. from Nagoya University in 1955 and taught at the university until 1958, when he moved to Catholic University. He joined the faculty at Brown University in 1960 and retired in 1995. He was an AMS member since 1951.

Jefferson Hartzler (1942-2008)
Hartzler died June 3 at the age of 66. Hartzler received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1970. He then became an assistant professor at Penn State Harrisburg, where he taught until his retirement in 2006. Hartzler served as chair of the department from 1986 until 1992.

Romae Cormier (1928-2008)
Cormier died July 24 at the age of 80. He was retired from Northern Illinois University, where he taught for 40 years. Cormier was an AMS member since 1958.

Michael Herschorn (1933-2008)
Herschorn died March 2 at the age of 74. He received his bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. from McGill University (Canada), where he was also on the faculty. In addition to being a professor at the university, Herschorn also served as Dean of Students. He was an AMS member since 1956.

Andrew Gleason (1921-2008)
Gleason, AMS president from 1981 to 1982, died October 17 about two weeks before what would have been his 87th birthday. He may be best known for his contributions to the solution of Hilbert's Fifth Problem for which he won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1952. After graduating from Yale University in 1942, Gleason served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a code breaker. He also served in the Korean War. In 1946 Gleason was appointed as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, and was appointed professor in 1957. In 1969 he was named Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at Harvard. He was the author of Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis and co-authored, with R.E. Greenwood and L.M. Kelly, The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, which contained all the problems and solutions from the tests from the competition's inception (in 1938) to 1964. He retired from Harvard in 1992. In 1996, Gleason received the MAA's Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics. About this, H.O. Pollak wrote in the American Mathematical Monthly (Volume 103, Number 2 (1996), pages 105-106), "In thinking about, and admiring, Andy Gleason's career, your natural reference is the total profession of a mathematician: designing and teaching courses, advising on education at all levels, doing research, consulting for the users of mathematics, acting as a leader of the profession, cultivating mathematical talent, and serving one's institution. Andy Gleason is that rare individual who has done all of these superbly." Gleason was an AMS member since 1941. The MacTutor biography of Gleason has more information as does an article (pdf) in the November Notices of the AMS.

Kenneth Hoffman (1930-2008)
Hoffman, former head of the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and active advocate for mathematics in U.S. public policy, died September 29 at the age of 77. Hoffman directed the David Committee from 1981 to 1984 (on federal support of mathematical research) and ran the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) Office of Governmental and Public Affairs from its inception in 1984 until 1989. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1956 and then began his 40 years at MIT. Hoffman co-authored the text Linear Algebra with Ray Kunze that was popular for many decades. In 1986 Hoffman received the first Public Service Award from the JPBM, and in 1990 he received the first AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service "for his outstanding leadership in establishing channels of communication between the mathematical community and makers of public policy as well as the general public." Hoffman was an AMS member since 1955. MIT has more posted a page with more information.

Jack L. Hursch (1930-2008)
Hursch died August 11 about one month shy of his 78th birthday. He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Hursch was an AMS member since 1973.

William "Bill" Swift (1928-2008)
Swift, professor emeritus at Wabash College, died September 11 at the age of 80. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky and subsequently taught at Kentucky, Cornell University, and Rutgers University. Swift went to Wabash College in 1963 and remained there until his retirement in 1990. At Wabash he is known for creating the Mathematics Colloquium, hosting the Wabash Functional Analysis Seminar, and for being the public address announcer for the swimming and diving teams. For forty years he and his wife, Ellen, hosted a gathering of people from the college and the Crawfordsville community. Swift was an AMS member since 1978. Wabash College has posted more information.

Alfred Aeppli (1928-2008)
Aeppli died September 14 at the age of 79. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zürich) in 1957. Aeppli then taught at Cornell University. In 1961 he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota where he taught for 37 years. Aeppli drove a streetcar in Minneapolis, which he did for 20 years, making a few runs as recently as 2007. He was an AMS member since 1960.

George Greaves (1941-2008)
Greaves died August 24. He was 67. Greaves received his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol (UK) in 1968. He was a lecturer at Reading University before joining the faculty at Cardiff University in 1969. Greaves was an AMS member since 1984.

Marcia Peterson Sward (1939-2008)
Sward, who was executive director of the MAA from 1989 to 1999, died September 21 of kidney cancer. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1967. Sward taught at Trinity College in Washington, DC before becoming associate director of the MAA in 1980. Among her other duties, she served as editor of FOCUS from its first issue in 1981 until 1985. In 1985 she became executive director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board, a position she held until her return to the MAA. During her tenure as executive director, programs such as SUMMA, Project NExT, and SIGMAAs were instituted. The MAA has posted more information and reminiscences. Her family has asked that contributions in her name be made to the Audubon Naturalist Society, where she served as director of education after her retirement from the MAA.

Donald H. Ballou (1908-2008)
Ballou died September 15 about six months after turning 100. As a senior at Yale University, he participated in the first Putnam Competition. Ballou received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1934 and then joined the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After eight years there he became a member of the faculty at Middlebury College, where he remained until his retirement in 1973. While at Middlebury, he chaired the department and initiated a program in computer studies in the 1960s. The mathematics computer lab at Middlebury is named in his honor. Ballou was an AMS member since 1934.

Ronald Gene Mosier (1938-2008)
Mosier died September 13 at the age of 70. He earned his Ph.D. at Wayne State University in 1971. In 2000 Mosier retired from Daimler Chrysler AG, after 30 years as an applied mathematician. He was also on the faculty at the University of Detroit Mercy. Mosier was an AMS member since 1975. Contributions in his memory can be made to the AMS Development Office.

Van A. McAuley (1926-2008)
McAuley died January 8 at the age of 81. He was retired from NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. McAuley was an AMS member since 1980.

William A. Beck (1930-2008)
Beck died August 15 at the age of 78. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1955, the same year he joined the AMS. Beck taught for 35 years at Chatham College (now Chatham University) in Pennsylvania.

Allan M. Krall (1936-2008)
Krall, a Professor Emeritus at Penn State, died at his home in State College, PA, on July 4. He was 72. Over his career he published 130 research papers and 3 books, and in his later years his research focused on Sobolev Space boundary-value problems and their applications to orthogonal polynomials. Krall graduated from the State College Area High School in 1954 and received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1958 from Penn State. He received his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He joined Penn State's department of mathematics faculty in 1963, where he remained until his retirement in 1998. Krall was an AMS member since 1971.

Oded Schramm (1961-2008)
Schramm, age 46, died September 1 in a tragic hiking accident. He made fundamental contributions to the understanding of critical processes in two dimensions, and to many other areas of mathematics, including percolation theory and circle packings. Schramm received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1990 and then worked at the Weizmann Institute. In 1999 he began work at Microsoft Research where he was employed at the time of his death. Schramm received the Erdős Prize, the Salem Prize, the Clay Research Award, the Poincaré Prize, the Loève Prize, the Pólya Prize, and the Ostrowski Prize. This year he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was an AMS member since 1987. Microsoft Research has posted a memorial page, with links to remembrances of Schramm.

L. Bruce Treybig (1931-2008)
Treybig, professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, died June 9 at the age of 76. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1958 under the direction of R.L. Moore. Treybig taught for 43 years, first at Tulane University then at Texas A&M. To honor him, the Bruce Treybig Scholarship was created for deserving undergraduate math majors at Texas A&M. He was an AMS member since 1954.

Pierre Leroux (1942-2008)
Leroux died March 9 at the age of 67. He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal in 1970. In 1971 he joined the faculty at the Université de Québec à Montréal, where he remained until his retirement in 2007. At the time of his retirement he was assistant dean of research at the university. Leroux wrote nearly 60 articles and two books and was the first director of LaCIM (Laboratoire de combinatoire et d'informatique mathématique). He was an AMS member since 1968. The university has posted a page (in French) with pictures and remembrances.

Henri Cartan (1904-2008)
Henri Cartan, one of the outstanding mathematicians of the twentieth century, died August 13 at the age of 104. Cartan, the son of mathematician Élie Cartan, was one of the founding members of the Bourbaki group and made important contributions to many areas of mathematics, including complex analysis, algebraic topology, and homological algebra. He co-authored Homological Algebra with Samuel Eilenberg and ran the Séminaire Cartan in Paris from 1948 to 1964. Cartan was elected to more than a dozen academies in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, and received the Wolf Prize in 1980. In addition to his work in mathematics, he is also known for his efforts to promote human rights and for restoring relations between mathematicians in France and Germany after World War II. More about Cartan's life and work is in "Interview with Henri Cartan" by Allyn Jackson in the August 1999 issue of Notices. He was an AMS member since 1950.

Paul Mielke (1920-2008)
Mielke died February 3 at the age of 87. He graduated from Wabash College in 1942, served in World War II, and earned his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1951. Following the completion of his doctorate, Mielke returned to Wabash as an assistant professor. In 1952 he took a job as an engineer with the Boeing Corporation in Seattle. In 1957, Mielke again returned to Wabash where--except for leaves of absence--he remained until his retirement in 1985. Mielke served as chair of the department from 1963 to 1978. He was an AMS member since 1946.

Richard C. Proto (1940-2008)
Proto, former chief of research at the National Security Agency (NSA), died July 27 at the age of 68. He earned his degrees at Fairfield University (1962) and Boston College (1964). Proto then went to work for the NSA where he remained until his retirement in 1999. While at the NSA, he received the Exceptional Civilian Service Award, the National Intelligence Medal of Honor, and the Presidential Rank Award.

Eldon Posey (1921-2008)
Posey died May 7 at the age of 87. He was an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Posey received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 1954, and was an AMS member since 1950.

Donald Lee Pilling (1943-2008)
Donald Lee Pilling, 64, a retired Navy four-star admiral who later became president and chief executive of the consulting firm LMI, died in Bethesda, MD, on May 26. Pilling was born in Bayside, N.Y. "He graduated fourth in his Naval Academy class of 1965 and became one of the school's first Trident Scholars. His research dealt with the abstractions of partially ordered systems, which he studied under his mentor and lifelong friend, James Abbott. Pilling received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1970, with a dissertation titled "The Algebra of Operators for Regular Events." He published articles in mathematical and professional journals throughout his life." Read the full obituary, "Navy Adm. Donald Pilling, 64; President of Consulting Firm," in the Washington Post, June 4, 2008, p. B06. He was a member of the AMS since 1971.

Edwin G. Eigel, Jr. (1932-2008)
Edwin G. Eigel, Jr., died on April 7, 2008, in Bridgeport, CT. Eigel graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954, and went on to a Fulbright Fellowship at Marburg University, Germany before marrying Marcia Duffy and serving in the Army. His duties in the military included cryptography. He joined the University of Bridgeport faculty in 1979 as professor of mathematics and vice president for academic affairs, and became provost two years later. He was president of the University of Bridgeport from 1991-1994, after he was named a president emeritus and life member of the university's board of trustees, on which he served until his death. After his presidency he had also returned to teaching mathematics until his retirement in 2002. Read the obituary, "Edwin G. Eigel Jr., former UB president and mathematics professor, dies at 75," published on the University of Bridgeport website. He was member of the AMS since 1956.

Daniel Rider (1938-2008)
Daniel Rider died on July 11, 2008, in Madison, WI. Born in Boston, MA, he graduated from Santa Ana, CA, high school, and went on to earn his bachelor's degree from Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964, specializing in Harmonic Analysis and Fourier Series, with Walter Rudin as his advisor. He was C.L.E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assistant professor at Yale University, and professor of mathematics with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1970, he was invited to address the International Congress of Mathematics, in Nice, France. He enjoyed teaching and after nearly 40 years at University of Wisconsin, retired in 2003 as Professor Emeritus. Read his obituary on the madison.com website. He was a member of the AMS since 1963.

Richard C. Roberts (1925-2008)
Roberts died March 27 at the age of 82. He received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1949. In 1966 Roberts became chair at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He established graduate programs in applied mathematics and statistics, and remained as chair until 1985. Roberts retired from UMBC in 1991. He was an AMS member since 1957.

Dan Butnariu (1951-2008)
Butnariu was born in Hirlau, Romania on February 1, 1951. He studied at University 'Al. I. Cuza' in Iasi, received his PhD in 1980 under Irinel Dragan, and continued to teach there until 1983. He immigrated to Israel in 1984, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science until 1986, when he moved to the University of Haifa. Dan was chair of the Department of Mathematics in 1997-1999, and has held visiting positions in Linz, at the University of Texas, in Rio de Janeiro, and at CUNY. An active researcher in various fields of applied mathematics, he published over 70 papers in approximation theory, convexity, operator theory, game theory, fuzzy topology, and mathematical economics. Dan had a number of graduate students, and served on the editorial board of several journals. He was a member of the AMS since 1985. He is survived by his wife, daughter, grandson, and mother.

Wilbert Eddie Cantey (1931-2008)
Cantey, known for his contributions to the game of blackjack, passed away on May 21. In the mid-1950s he and Roger Baldwin, James McDermott and Herbert Maisel, spent "over a year and a half pounding numbers into desk calculators and using probability law in their search for a statistically sound, card-playing strategy." ("Mathematician Co-Authored Guide to Winning at Blackjack," obituary by Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, Washington Post, July 6, 2008). Their results were published in the article "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, in 1956), and in a book "Playing Blackjack to Win: A New Strategy for the Game of 21," published in 1957. The team was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2008. Cantey taught high school mathematics in Columbia, SC, from 1951-52, and during his years at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland (1954-1962) he was involved in research and development using mathematics, statistics and computer technology. He became a government statistician, later owned a consulting company, and throughout his life tutored in mathematics, formally and informally.

Krzysztof P. Wojciechowski (1953-2008)
Wojciechowski, a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, died June 28 at the age of 54. He was born in Poland and received his Ph.D. from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1982. In addition to being an accomplished mathematician, Wojciechowski was also very proficient in judo. An online obituary has links to remembrances in a guest book, one of which recalls the time at the end of his talk at the end of a workshop when Wojciechowski showed his appreciation to the organizers by doing a handstand. He was an AMS member since 1987.

Narain Gupta (1936-2008)
Gupta died April 11 at the age of 71. He was a faculty member at the University of Manitoba (Canada). Gupta received his Ph.D. from Australian National University in 1965 and was an AMS member since 1968.

Arthur W. Chou (1954-2008)
Chou, a professor at Clark University, died June 25 after being hit by a train. He was 53. Chou received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University), under the direction of Jeff Cheeger. He then joined the faculty at Clark, where except for visiting positions, he remained for his entire career.

Detlef Gromoll (1938-2008)
Gromoll, who along with Jeff Cheeger laid part of the groundwork for Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture, died May 31 at the age of 70. Part of his collaboration with Cheeger was the "soul theorem," which allowed the inference of the structure of certain surfaces from the properties of a central core. Gromoll was born in Berlin in 1938 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1964. He taught at several universities, including Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1969. Gromoll was an AMS member since 1967.

Vadim Komkov (1919-2008)
Komkov died May 14 at the age of 88. He was born in Moscow and served in the Royal Air Force in World War II. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1964. Komkov was a professor at Texas Tech University from 1969 to 1980 and began the University's fencing club in the 1970s. He was an AMS member since 1966.

Gene F. Rose (1918-2008)
Rose, professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, died May 8 a little less than two months after his 90th birthday. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1952 under the direction of Stephen Kleene. In the years immediately following his doctorate, Rose worked at the Sandia Corporation, the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, and at Systems Development Corporation. He then taught at Case Western Reserve University. In 1977 he became the founding chair of the computer science department at Cal State, Fullerton and remained there until his retirement in 1987. Rose was an AMS member since 1944.

Gilbert Hunt (1916-2008)
Hunt, who did foundational work on Markov processes and for whom the Hunt process is named, died May 30 at the age of 92. In addition to being an accomplished mathematician, Hunt was a great tennis player. He was ranked first in the U.S. in junior tennis and later upset Bobby Riggs in a 1938 match at Forest Hills. During World War II, Hunt trained as a weather forecaster and help develop forecasts for the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Following the war he served as an attaché to John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1948 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Hunt taught at Cornell University but then returned to Princeton where he remained until his retirement in 1986. He was chair of the department from 1966 to 1968. Princeton has posted an obituary.

Eugene Isaacson (1919-2008)
Isaacson, one of the pioneers of modern numerical mathematics, died March 31 at the age of 89. He received his Ph.D. in 1949 from New York University. Isaacson co-authored the text Analysis of Numerical Methods with Herb Keller, and was editor of Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computations (which became Mathematics of Computation) for many years. An interview conducted by Philip J. Davis in 2003 is online at the SIAM Oral History. Isaacson was an AMS member since 1947.

Ernest Schlesinger (1925-2008)
Schlesinger, professor emeritus at Connecticut College, died March 3 at the age of 82. In 1940, after Schlesinger's uncle had been beaten to death by storm troopers and his father had been imprisoned for a year, the family fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to the U.S. In World War II, Schlesinger served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under the direction of Lars Ahlfors. He was on the faculty at the University of Washington, Yale University, and Wesleyan University before joining the faculty at Connecticut College. After teaching for 34 years at the College, including time as chair, Schlesinger retired in 1996 but was still active, regularly attending departmental seminars until the fall of 2007. He was an AMS member since 1949. Connecticut College has posted an editorial by David Collins, from the March 5 issue of The Day (New London, CT) that has more information.

Graham Higman (1917-2008)
Higman, who was Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford, died April 8 at the age of 91. He worked in group theory, producing many results, including the Hall-Higman theorems with Philip Hall in 1956. Higman received his Ph.D. in 1941 from Oxford under the direction of Henry Whitehead. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1958, served as president of the London Mathematical Society from 1965 to 1967, won its Bewick Prize in 1962, the DeMorgan Medal in 1974, and the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal in 1979. Following his retirement from Oxford, he was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois from 1984 to 1986. In 1987 he told an interviewer that doing fundamental research, "makes you more worthwhile than before; it is something that if you cut yourself off from, you are making yourself less human than you ought to be." An obituary in The Independent has more information.

Allen Devinatz (1922-2008)
Devinatz, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, died February 5 at the age of 85. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1950, and was a member of the Northwestern University Mathematics Department from 1967 to 1992. Devinatz was an AMS member since 1950.

Donald Solitar (1932-2008)
Solitar died April 25 at the age of 75. He, along with Abe Karrass, helped make the York University (Canada) mathematics department a center for combinatorial group theory. Solitar received his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1958 and went to York as head of the mathematics department in 1968. He also served as acting chair of York's computer science department until 1973. He co-authored the classic text Combinatorial Group Theory along with his advisor, Wilhelm Magnus, and Karrass. In 1982, Solitar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was an AMS member since 1954.

Alex Heller (1925-2008)
Heller died January 31 at the age of 82. As a young man, he worked on the Manhattan Project under Richard Feynman. In 1950 Heller received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He spent most of his career at City University of New York's Graduate School and University Center, and supervised the math program's first Ph.D. graduate, Yuh-Ching Chen, in 1966. Heller was an AMS member since 1947.

Tom Whiteside (1932-2008)
Whiteside died April 22 at the age of 75. He was a leading authority on the works of Isaac Newton and spent much of his life translating and editing Newton's mathematical papers. In 1975 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Whiteside retired as professor of the history of mathematics and exact sciences at Cambridge University in 1999. The Times (London) published a summary of Whiteside's life.

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. Read the UC Berkeley obituary, Mathematician Murray Protter has died at 90."

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. Szüsz was a member since 1966. Donations in his memory may be made to the Society's Centennial Fellowship Fund. Read a remembrance of Szüsz by Bodo Volkmann (published in the journal Uniform Distribution Theory).

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 earlier 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.