Wallie Abraham Hurwitz

Born in Fulton, Missouri, on February 18, 1886, he studied at the University of Missouri, earned another master's degree at Harvard, and completed his Ph.D. at Göttingen in 1910. That same year he joined Cornell University, where he spent the rest of his career, rising from instructor to professor and later professor emeritus.

He made important contributions in several areas of mathematics and was especially known for early work on the theory of divergent series. Colleagues remembered him as a superb teacher whose lectures were carefully prepared and whose standards were exacting, with a strong belief that ideas should be rigorously proved and fully understood.

His interests reached far beyond mathematics. He was an enthusiastic violist, a devoted attendee of concerts and plays, and a collector of Gilbert and Sullivan materials as well as works on cryptography and cryptanalysis, collections he later left to Cornell. Memorial tributes also describe him as generous with students and younger colleagues, intellectually curious, and warmly loyal in friendship.