Obituaries

Robert I. Rowe of Ithaca, associate director of financial aid, died at the Cayuga Medical Center, Dec. 15, 2000. He was 58.

In August 2000, Rowe celebrated his 24th year at Cornell as associate director of financial aid. He loved his job, those closest to him say. He cared deeply for students and took great pleasure in helping them to attend Cornell. He cherished his many friends in the Cornell community and was a dedicated Cornell sports fan.

He married his wife, Ellen, in 1967, and together they shared 33 wonderful years of marriage, filled with warmth and devotion, say members of his family, who add that he was a caring and wonderful father.

He is survived by his wife; his daughter, Kirsten, B.S. '00, of Hoboken, N.J.; his son Benjamin, B.S. '97, of San Francisco; his mother, Kathryn, of Sun City, Ariz.; and his brother, Andrew, of Nevada City, Calif.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Robert I. Rowe Scholarship Fund, c/o Jacquie Wright, Scholarship Development, Cornell, 55 Brown Road, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850. The scholarship aims to help needy students who have overcome adversity.

Mathematician Paul Olum, who worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II, became chair of the mathematics department at Cornell and then provost and president of the University of Oregon, died Jan. 19 in Sharon, Mass. He was 82.

In the early 1940s, while working as a physicist at Princeton University, Olum joined Hans Bethe, the eminent Cornell physicist, at Los Alamos on the project to develop the first nuclear weapon. He earned his M.A. in physics from Princeton in 1942 but switched his eld to mathematics, earning his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1947. After a two-year stay at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he arrived at Cornell as an assistant professor in 1949.

At the time, Olum was the only representative of the burgeoning eld of algebraic topology in the Cornell mathematics department. In the following years, he built the eld at Cornell into one of the strongest in the nation.

In 1962 Olum initiated the Topology Festival, an annual regional professional gathering at which the major developments in the subject were presented. This became the most prestigious topology conference in the country and is still an annual event at Cornell.

From 1963 to 1966, Olum served as department chair. He was an active participant in faculty governance and in 1971 was elected to the Cornell Board of Trustees. In 1974, he moved to the University of Texas as dean of the arts college. Later, he was named provost, then president, of the University of Oregon, retiring at the age of 70.

He is survived by a son, Ken, in Sharon, Mass; a daughter, Joyce Galaski; and several grandchildren.