EPADEL:A Semisesquicentennial History, 1926-2000

Carl John Rees (1896-1986) was born in Millersville, PA. He received his A.B. degree from Franklin & Marshall in 1918 and joined the faculty at the University of Delaware two years later. While continuing to teach at Delaware he obtained a masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1925, probably taking classes at Chicago’s famed summer session. He received his Ph.D. under section chair J. A. Shohat at Penn in 1940. At that time, Rees was appointed chairman of the department at Delaware, a position he held for the next ten years. He became the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Delaware in 1950, holding the post until 1962. In the meantime he also served as Provost of the University from 1955 to 1962. Rees retired as professor emeritus in 1962. He died in Newark, Delaware, in 1986, just three months shy of his 90 th birthday.

Cyril Arthur Nelson (1893-1984) was born and raised in Kansas. He received his A.B. degree from Midland College (Kansas) in 1914 and his A.M. from the University of Kansas in 1916. He enrolled in the graduate program at Princeton University for the year 1916-1917 before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1919 without an official supervisor. Nelson taught at three different colleges before accepting a position in 1927 at the New Jersey College for Women, which was founded in 1918 and later became affiliated with Rutgers University. He remained at Rutgers until his retirement in 1959. He died in 1984 at the age of 90.

Emory P. Starke 1896-1989) was born in New York City. He received all three of his degrees from Columbia University: A.B. 1916, M.A. 1917, and Ph.D. 1928. He joined the faculty at Rutgers in 1919 at age 23 and stayed there until compulsory retirement as professor emeritus in 1961. Instead of retiring completely, however, Starke spent the next five years as a professor at Bloomfield College. An inveterate problem solver, he is known to many present EPADEL members for his longtime stint of Associate Editor of the Monthly and for his many contributions to its problems department. He took over the advanced problems section of the Monthly in 1947 when that department’s first editor, Otto Dunkel, asked to be relieved. Starke died in 1989 at age 93.

James Elmer Davis (1887-1964) was born and raised in Wisconsin. He attended the Wisconsin State Normal School from 1901 to 1905 but for unknown reasons left without obtaining a degree. He then taught at public schools in Wisconsin and South Dakota until 1910, whereupon he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, earning two degrees, a bachelors in 1912 and a masters in 1913. That year Davis accepted a position at the Pennsylvania State College (now University), so his affiliation was listed as Penn State when he became a charter member of the national MAA in 1916. He served in the army during World War I from 1917 through 1919. In the early 1920s he taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arkansas before accepting a position at the Drexel Institute of Technology in the fall of 1923. He remained in the EPADEL region for the rest of his professional career, almost all of it spent at Drexel, where he served as chair of the department from 1942 until his retirement in 1952. Davis was an active member of the MAA from the time he attended the annual MAA meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 1926. He attended almost all of the section’s annual meetings and played a pivotal role in the section’s being able to hold annual meetings throughout World War II. Davis’s election to head the Philadelphia Section made him the first in a line of chairs from Drexel who held that office each decade from the 1940s through the 1980s. He died in Florida in 1964 after having been an MAA member for 48 years.

George Emil Raynor (1895-1975) was born in San Francisco. He earned his B.A. degree from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1918 and two degrees from Princeton, a masters in 1920 and a Ph.D. in 1923. A stint in the Army in 1918 prevented him from completing his dissertation sooner. After teaching at two colleges, Raynor accepted a position at Lehigh University in 1931. He remained there for the rest of his life, directing the doctoral dissertation of one student. In 1948 he was selected as the head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy, a position he held until 1960. He retired as professor emeritus in 1964. Raynor was one of only two chairs of the Philadelphia Section to hail from a Lehigh Valley institution during the period 1942-1955.

Frank Leroy Manning (1898-1986) was born in Mount Hope, New York. He received a B.S. at Cornell in 1919 after having spent the year 1917-1918 with the U.S. Naval Reserves. Later he obtained an M.S. degree in mathematics (1924) from Rutgers and a Ph.D. in statistics (1935) from Cornell. During the 1920s Manning taught high school in New Jersey for two years before becoming a principal in New York the next two years. After a two-year stint at a state teacher’s college, he accepted a position at Ursinus College in 1930. He remained at Ursinus for the rest of his career except for the war years 1942-1944, when he taught extension courses in engineering science and management for the war-training program conducted by Penn State. He died in Collegeville at the age of 88.

Alexander Tartler (1905-1985) was born in Budapest, Hungary. He received two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, a bachelors in 1928 and a Ph.D. five years later. Like Delaware’s C. J. Rees, his dissertation was written under J. A. Shohat. After earning his undergraduate degree he joined the faculty at the Drexel Institute of Technology and remained there until 1949, when he moved to Lafayette College. Although Tartler was promoted to full professor and department chairman at Lafayette in 1951, he returned to Drexel the very next year to accept an offer of these same two positions. He retained the chairmanship until 1966 and retired four years later. Tartler was known by his students as a very rigorous instructor whose backboard writings were works of art. Although he drove many engineering students crazy with his precision, this trait inspired several engineering-to-mathematics converts. Tartler died at \(B0^{th}\) birthday.

Truman Lester Koehler (1902-1989) was a Lehigh Valley citizen through and through. Born in Bethlehem, PA, he graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1924, taught at Allentown Prep School for the next three years, and then joined the faculty of his alma mater in 1927. He remained there for 45 years and chaired the mathematics department for 14 of them. During this time, Koehler managed to pick up his M.A. in 1932 and his Ph.D. in 1950 – both from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctorate was in mathematics education for a dissertation titled, “The selection of certain significant concepts in college algebra and the determination of their degree of emphasis in some widely adopted texts”. In World War II, Koehler directed Muhlenberg’s Engineering, Science, Management, and War Training Program and, as noted above, served as chair of the Philadelphia Section 1954-1955. He died in 1989, just two weeks shy of his 87 th birthday. His son, Truman Koehler, Jr. – a statistician and successful businessman – has been instrumental in keeping alive the memory of his father by generous contributions to the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Muhlenberg. These include a gift of Euler’s mathematical works to the college library, the commissioning of portraits of his parents that now hang outside the departmental offices (Mrs. Koehler was a friend of the students for the better part of half a century), and an endowment for the Truman Koehler Professorship. The present Koehler Professor of Mathematics is William Dunham, who, as many MAA members can attest, has taken full advantage of Koehler’s bequest of Euler’s works.

Philip Martin Whitman (1916-1997) was born in Pittsburgh. He received a bachelors degree from Haverford College in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1941 under Garrett Birkhoff at Harvard. Whitman spent the next three years at the University of Pennsylvania. Like almost all American mathematicians in the 1940s, World War II interrupted Whitman’s career. During 1944-1946 he was a scientist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory at the University of California, which explains why his tenure as secretary ended in 1944. After the war Whitman taught at Tufts College for two years before moving to the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University as a mathematician in 1948. In 1961 he left Johns Hopkins to become professor of mathematics and chairman of the department at Rhode Island College. Whitman died in Massachusetts at the age of 80.

Walter Helbig Gottschalk (1918-2004) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. He took all his higher education at the University of Virginia: B.S. 1939, M.A. 1942, and Ph.D. 1944 (under G. A. Hedlund). He went right from graduate school to the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until 1963, serving as chairman of the department from 1954 to 1958. Gottschalk spent the academic year 1947-1948 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1963 he accepted a professorship at Wesleyan University, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. An article from the 1999 Monthly titled “The Gottschalk-Hedlund Theorem” reflects the enduring influence of the advisor/student pair from their initial investigation 55 years earlier.

Truman Arthur Botts was born in 1917 in Florida. He received his B.S. degree in mathematics and physics from then-tiny Stetson University in Florida in 1938, followed by two degrees from the University of Virginia, a masters in 1940 and a Ph.D. in 1942 (under E. J. McShane). He joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 1946 but remained only two years before returning to Virginia. It was during his second year at Delaware that he was elected secretary of the section. Although his stint lasted but one year it foreshadowed administrative abilities that surfaced when he left the University of Virginia in 1968 to become Executive Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. Today Botts is retired and living in Arlington, Virginia. He is best known for his book Real Analysis, written with his dissertation supervisor, E. J. (“Jimmy”) McShane, and first published in 1959.

Richard Donald Schafer was born in 1918 in Buffalo, New York. He received two degrees from the University of Buffalo (B.A. 1938 and M.A. 1940) and a Ph.D. in 1942 from the University of Chicago (under A. A. Albert). In 1942 he also married fellow graduate student Alice Turner right after the two of them had earned their degrees. R. D. Schafer was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1953, during which time he was secretary of our section 1951-1953. His wife served on the Program Committee during the year 1952-1953. However, the Schafers left Pennsylvania in 1953 when he became head of the department at the University of Connecticut. He accepted the position of deputy head at MIT in 1959. Although he stepped down as deputy head in 1968, he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1988. The Schafers reside in Lexington, MA.

Foster Leroy Dennis (1910-1983) was born on New Year’s Day in West Milton, PA. He received a B.S. degree from Ursinus College in 1931, an M.S. from Cornell the next year, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1938 (under Arnold Emch). Before enrolling at Illinois he taught at his alma mater, Ursinus, for one year, and he returned to the same department upon obtaining his doctorate. Although F. L. Dennis remained at Ursinus for the rest of his life, he also taught courses at a Penn State extension for two years during World War II, worked for the State Department of Public Instruction for a year, and was a consultant for Philco Corporation. He was a member of the Program Committee of the Philadelphia Section in 1944 and 1953.

Nathan J. Fine (1916-1994) was born, raised, and educated in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. from Temple University in 1936, followed by two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania: A.M. 1939 and Ph.D. 1946 (under Antoni Zygmund). N. J. Fine studied for his doctorate while teaching high school for one year, teaching college (Cornell and Purdue) for three years, and being a research mathematician at both the Naval Ordnance Plant in Indiana and the Operations Evaluation Group in Washington, DC. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 and remained there until 1963. It was during this time that he was active with the Philadelphia Section. Fine moved to Penn State in 1963 and spent the rest of his life there, having retired in 1978.

Walter Rue Murray (1905-1993) was born in Maryland but received his early education in New Jersey. He earned a B.S. degree from Colgate College in 1929 and then accepted an appointment at Franklin & Marshall College. While teaching there he pursued graduate studies at Cornell, obtaining an M.S. in 1932. He returned to Cornell from 1938 to 1940 to continue his graduate studies, but he never earned a doctorate because his dissertation advisor, R. J. Walker, was called into government service in connection with WWII. The proposed title of his thesis was “Linear systems of plane curves”. Known as “Rue” Murray, he was appointed head of the department at F & M in 1945 after serving as acting head for sixth months. He presented an invited address to the section in 1936 and was a member of Program Committee in 1945. He stepped down as chair in 1951. Murray died in 1993 just one month shy of his 88 th birthday.