Alfred Gray (1939-1998)

Alfred Gray was a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of Maryland College Park for thirty years. He was the author or coauthor of three books and over one hundred research papers; another book and several more papers were in preparation at the time of his death. His primary research interests were in differential geometry. Specific areas of that broad field in which he made significant contributions include volumes of tubes and balls, curvature identities, topological obstructions to the existence of geometrical structures, and classification theorems for various types of geometrical structure. He had fruitful interactions with many other mathematicians; something like half his papers are joint, with at least twenty distinct coauthors among them.

Professor Gray was a pioneer in the use of electronic computation both in mathematical research and in teaching, and usually had several computers in use in his office. He won an Educom distinguished software award for a project in which the computer platform Mathematica was used as a teaching tool in differential geometry. His textbooks on differential geometry and ordinary differential equations are both intended to be used in conjunction with Mathematica.

Paul Green, November, 1998