PASADENA - John “Jack” Todd, a Caltech professor
emeritus and one of the pioneers of 20th-century
mathematics, died June 21 at his home in Pasadena. He
was 96.

Todd, who started his career in the days before
computers or hand-held calculators, specialized in
understanding how to find numerical answers to
complicated equations.

“The methods that he developed to solve all kinds of
equations had to be really, really efficient because
you couldn’t just punch a few keys on a computer,”
Gary Lorden, a Caltech mathematician, said Monday.

Now, although most people use computers to solve
complex math, “what goes on behind the scenes is very
much the application of the kind of mathematics that
Jack developed,” Lorden said.

Todd was “a very fine gentleman of the old school,”
Lorden said.

In a statement, Caltech officials said Todd was born
in Ireland in 1911 and grew up near Belfast, Northern
Ireland. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Queen’s
University, Belfast, in 1931 and attended Cambridge
University for graduate studies.

At King’s College in London he met and wed Olga
Taussky, one of the most prominent female
mathematicians of the century.

“They just loved mathematics -
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that was the center of their life, that was their
great love,” Lorden said. In 1939, when Britain
declared war on Germany, Todd took a post with the
British Admiralty, studying ways to protect ships from
enemy fire.

In his Caltech oral history, Todd - referred to by
some as the “Savior of Oberwolfach” - recalled his
wartime rescue of the Mathematical Research Institute
at Oberwolfach in Germany as “probably the best thing
I ever did for mathematics.”

Near the war’s end, he and his colleagues investigated
rumors that mathematicians were being held as
prisoners of war in Germany’s Black Forest. There,
they discovered that the University of Freiburg was
protecting the mathematicians at the institute. Todd
claimed the building for the Admiralty and prevented
Moroccan troops from destroying the school and its
work.

He and Olga Taussky-Todd came to the United States in
1947 and took posts at Caltech in 1957, where he
remained a professor until his retirement.

She was the first woman to receive a formal Caltech
teaching appointment, and, in 1971, a full
professorship. She remained active in research until
her death in 1995.

The couple, who lived simply and saved their money,
donated a seven-figure endowment to Caltech to support
future generations of mathematicians.

Services have not been announced.

elise.kleeman@sgvn.com

(626) 578-6300, Ext. 4451

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(Other blogs, like Mathematics Weblog (by Steve) ask you to perform a certain sum before you can comment. Maybe you could get that if you don’t like captchas.)