Morton Brown, professor emeritus of mathematics, died peacefully Aug. 3 in Bellevue, Washington, at age 92.
Brown was born in the Bronx on Aug. 12, 1931. His father, Irving Brown, emigrated from Romania just after the turn of the century, and owned and operated a fruit and vegetable store in Manhattan. Brown’s mother, Shirley Lehrman, was of Polish-Russian descent. Brown had an older brother, Jack, who went to New York University for an engineering degree after serving in the navy during World War II.
In 1956, Brown married Kaaren Strauch, who later became a professor of social work at Eastern Michigan University. They had three sons, Aaron, Alan and Carl and six grandchildren. After retiring, Brown and Kaaren moved to California to be near their son Carl and to fulfill their dream of living in San Francisco. Kaaren died in October 2021, and after her passing, Brown moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, to live with his son Aaron, and from there moved to Bellevue, Washington, to be near Alan.
In an interview done by David Roberts and published in Celebratio Mathematica in 2000, Brown related his early history. He recounted that he finished high school in June 1948 at the age of 17. He went on to the University of Wisconsin and there met one of his most influential mentors, R. H. Bing in the spring of 1950 in an elementary calculus class.
Bing urged Brown to take his graduate topology course, which he did, but then he dropped out and retook it the following year, sharing that it was much easier the second time. Brown finished his B.S. in 1953, after taking a one-semester break in order to, as he put it, “figure out how to have a social life and also be a mathematician.”
Brown went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and taught at the University of Michigan for almost 30 years. He wrote numerous papers in topology and dynamical systems, and served as a Sloan Fellow, a Naval Research Fellow and a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
He has had visiting appointments at Cambridge University; University of Warwick; University of California, San Diego; Imperial College, London; Mathematical Research Institute, Berkeley; and University of Wisconsin. He and Barry Mazur shared the American Mathematical Society’s fourth Oswald Veblen Prize in geometry.
At U-M, Brown served on the governing boards of the Rackham Graduate School, LSA, Board of Intercollegiate Athletics, and the Faculty Senate, including as chair. He served as the Department of Mathematics associate chair for education and on the policy board of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
Despite all of Brown’s professional achievements, he was most proud of his wife and his family. He will be missed.
— Submitted by the Brown family
