Orange Alert

Guy Johnson

Biography

Guy Johnson

Guy Johnson Jr. earned an MBA at Harvard (1947) and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Rice (1955), with a dissertation written under Szolem Mandelbroit. He was a faculty member at Rice, visited here in 1964-1966 and joined SU in 1966, and he was promoted to Professor in 1969. Guy also had visiting positions at Illinois (1961-1962), Geneva (1971-1972), Colorado (1976-1977), Stanford (1978) and Cornell (1982-1983). He wrote 12 papers, generally in analysis, specifically complex analysis and harmonic functions, and moved later toward applications.

He had 7 Ph.D. students, 5 of them at SU: Richard Summerville (1969), Clara Lim (1970), James Porter (1972), Ronald Barnes (1972) and Thomas McDonald (1976). He organized the Department of Mathematics Lectureship Program in 1979-1982 and 1983-1985, and he gave 16 lectures in that program. Guy served as chair of the Nominating Committee for the Department Chair (1978-1979), and was a member of the Executive and Graduate Committees, review committees for several faculty members and the College Curriculum Committee which formulated the Standard Plan (1978-1979). He was a member of AMS, MAA and Sigma Xi.

Guy retired in 1987, and he and Jean moved in 1990 to Spencer, New York, south of Ithaca. In 1993 they built an observatory on their property there, where Guy pursues his love of astronomy. Its roof slides off to reveal a six-inch refractor. Jean died in 1999 and a number of us from the SU mathematics department went down there for an open house he and his family had shortly thereafter.

Guy Johnson passed away on August 30, 2017, in Loveland, CO. Obituary.