THE GUTERMAN AWARD:
An award in memory of Martin Guterman, beloved faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, for the first-year student with the highest academic achievement in mathematics, to encourage further study in that field.
Donations to the Guterman Award Fund can be mailed to:
Brigette A. Bryant
Senior Director of Development A&S
Tufts University Development Office
80 George Street, Suite 300-2
Medford, MA 02155
Checks should be made payable to "Trustees of Tufts College",
Please be sure to specify "for the fund in memory of Martin Guterman".
On-Line donations can be made by logging on to:
https://www.alumniconnections.com/donate/tufts/
please be sure to specify "for the fund in memory of Martin Guterman".
Making donations by other means or if you have any questions, please contact 617-627-3732
Professor Martin Guterman came to Tufts as an Instructor in 1966. After he completed his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1968, he was promoted to Assistant Professor; he became Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1987. Professor Guterman’s research was in a branch of mathematics called group theory. Group theory is the study of symmetry, and is of fundamental importance in mathematics and theoretical physics. Professor Guterman’s major research papers were part of one of the grandest enterprises in twentieth century mathematics, the effort to classify all finite simple groups, that is, to produce a “periodic table” of the “elements” from which all finite groups are composed. This project involved the combined efforts of well over 100 mathematicians by the time it was completed in the mid-1980s. Professor Guterman’s major contribution to the project was to study the structure of the exceptional Lie groups of type F_4 defined over a finite field of characteristic two. Later he also published a paper with Richard Weiss and a graduate student, Susan Danielson, on 3- tranposition groups. This class of groups played an important role in the classification of finite simple groups.
Professor Guterman was a truly extraordinary teacher. He was central in initiating many of the courses that are now standard in our mathematics curriculum, including Discrete Mathematics (Mathematics 22), Number Theory (Mathematics 41), Linear Algebra (Mathematics 46), and the graduate-level sequence in algebra (now Mathematics 215-16). He helped shape the current differential equations course taken by all engineering majors (Mathematics 38), which is unusual in its use of differential equations to motivate basic linear algebra. This innovation was a central theme of the book he wrote with Zbigniew Nitecki, which served as the text for Mathematics 38 (as well as courses at many other institutions around the country, notably Yale and Berkeley) through three editions, from 1984 until 2003. However, the course that he regarded as his proudest achievement in teaching was Mathematics 8, "Symmetry", a course for non-technical majors which uses wallpaper patterns and the art of M. C. Escher to introduce students in a concrete way to basic ideas in group theory. At the end of Mathematics 8, the students produce art projects illustrating some of the different possible types of symmetry in the plane. Professor Guterman’s office in Bromfield-Pearson Hall was always filled with spectacular examples of his students’ projects. His (unpublished) manuscript of over 200 pages, which continues to serve as the text for Mathematics 8, is a tour de force of exposition, explaining sophisticated ideas from group theory to an audience whose exposure to abstract mathematics is minimal. This course, together with "The Mathematics of Social Choice", another Guterman creation, continues to be the most popular way for students in the arts and humanities to fulfill their mathematics distribution requirement at Tufts.
Many of Professor Guterman’s colleagues outside the Mathematics Department came to know him through his energetic and wide-ranging involvement in committee work at Tufts. He served on and chaired many of the important faculty committees in Arts, Science and Engineering, including the Educational Policies Committee (1976-81, chair 1977-9), Budget and Priorities (1977- 82), Tenure and Promotion (1983-6, chair 1985-6), the Policy and Programs Committee of the Graduate School (1990-2001), Liberal Arts and Jackson Curriculum (1998-2001, chair 1999-2001), Engineering Curriculum (1985- 94), and the Faculty Liaison Committee (1999-2000). He also served for many years as the Mathematics Department liaison to the Education Department.
Professor Guterman was a passionate and knowledgeable listener of classical music. He accumulated a truly extraordinary collection of classical music recordings, both vinyl and digital. He took great pride in the achievements of his wife Sonia as a biochemist and more recently intellectual property rights lawyer, and of his daughters Lila, a science writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Beth, a concert violist.
A scholarship was established in Professor Guterman’s name to encourage an outstanding first-year undergraduate at Tufts to continue the study of mathematics. Many of Professor Guterman’s former students have contributed to funding this scholarship. Another scholarship has been established in Professor Guterman’s name to encourage a high-school student at the New England Conservatory in the study of chamber music.
With donations from several publishers of mathematical books (especially Klaus Peters), a collection of books about mathematics, accessible and interesting to a broad and general audience, is being set up in Professor Guterman’s memory. This collection will be housed in the reading area on the third floor of Bromfield-Pearson Hall, now called the Martin Guterman Library.
Professor Guterman died of cancer on February 1, 2004.