Applied Mathematician William Ames Disliked the Term "Math"

August 27, 2009

William Francis Ames, who died at age 82 on Aug. 3, 2009, preferred the more dignified word "mathematics."

Former Georgia Tech colleague Maria Clara Nucci explained that the name "math" abridges the vast discipline.  "Mathematics opens your mind," Nucci told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "If it doesn't, you're probably just studying math."

Ames' wife, Terry, indicated that the precision of the science had attracted her husband to mathematics. "There are no ifs, ands, or buts about [it]," she said. "It is very logical and rational, like him."

During his career of over 35 years, Ames taught at nearly a dozen universities, both in the U.S. and abroad. He headed several mathematics departments, including Georgia Tech's, and wrote 18 technical books and more than 100 research articles. According to Nucci, some of his most significant contributions to the science were his ground-breaking work solving mathematical models with computers and his insistence on the need to find solutions for nonlinear problems.

Ames was an early supporter of female mathematicians. In his efforts to increase the number of women in the field, Ames "was a man ahead of his time," Nucci claimed. In fact, his own daughter, Karen Ames, a former member of the MAA, became a professor of mathematics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aug. 12, 2009.