The Department of Mathematics and Statistics along with Dr. William LaCourse, Dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, join the entire UMBC community in mourning the passing of Professor Emeritus Thomas Seidman on August 14, 2024.
A native of New York, Dr. Seidman earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from Columbia University Teachers College, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from New York University. He worked at Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore Lab in the 1960s, and held positions at UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, Wayne State University, and Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the UMBC faculty as an associate professor in 1972. In January 2017, he retired after 45 years of distinguished scholarship and service to UMBC, with wide-ranging contributions to the mathematics community.
During his time at UMBC, Tom was an esteemed and omnipresent entity in the department. In addition to his extensive contributions to the intellectual life of the department, Tom also played a strong role in the department. He wrote the departmental bylaws on the chair election procedure and was the promotion and tenure (P&T) committee chair for a long time. In 1992, he served as the acting Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
He was a prolific mathematician with well over a hundred publications (169 with 69 co-authors from MathSciNet) and a Google Scholar citation count of over 4000. His area of research was “all things applied analysis,” which included partial differential equations, control theory and semigroup theory, and was often applied to various mathematical modeling problems. He also contributed to the field of operations research. It was almost customary for him to kick off the math colloquium series, as well as the differential equations seminar series every semester, by being the first person to volunteer to speak. There was a special seat reserved for him in the front row of MP401 from where he would dim and brighten the room lights during seminars and colloquia. His colleagues remarked that they could always count on Tom to pose insightful questions to the speaker after the talk.
Despite his mathematical stature, Tom was a very friendly and unassuming colleague. Conversations with him always wound up centering around an interesting mathematical problem, whether from first year calculus or advanced functional analysis. Tom was also an enthusiastic mentor to many junior faculty. He collaborated with multiple colleagues in the department and also with many others from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He spent the 1980-81 school year as a visiting professor at the University of Nice, and during one sabbatical, he visited seven countries on five continents. Tom had an Erdős number of three.
Tom married his late wife, Dr. Marjorie Shriro, in 1969. He is survived by his son, Gregory, daughter-in-law, Carrie, and grandchildren, Ren and Avery. He will be greatly missed. Services for Dr. Seidman will be held at the Owen Brown Interfaith Center in Columbia, MD on Saturday, January 11, 2025.
