Obituaries and Memorials

Russell D. Martin, professor emeritus of communication, whose devotion to community organizations helped raise funds for many people in need, died May 21 at Ithaca. He was 85.

About 17 years ago, Martin helped to start the Livermore Society, an association for the major United Way donors of Tompkins County. Members of the society make annual gifts above $600.

Martin was born Sept. 3, 1917, in West Henrietta, N.Y., and graduated from Monroe High School in Rochester in 1934.

Martin came to Cornell as an undergraduate student and he graduated from the university's College of Agriculture (now College of Agriculture and Life Sciences) with a bachelor's degree in 1939 and a master's degree in 1941.

He joined the Cornell faculty in 1949 as an assistant professor of animal husbandry and then became as assistant professor of extension training, in a department that later became the Department of Extension Teaching and Information, a forerunner to present-day Department of Communication. Martin taught courses in oral communication, parliamentary procedure and effective listening.

He was promoted to associate professor in 1954 and then to professor in 1970. He became an emeritus professor in 1983. In 1960, he received the Professor of Merit Award, one of the highest honors bestowed by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

An active faculty member, he served as speaker and parliamentarian for the Faculty Council of Representatives, the group that became the university's Faculty Senate. He also served as a faculty adviser to the Cornell wrestling team.

Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Martin taught vocational agriculture in Clyde Central School (1941-43) and while there, he served as an adviser to the Future Farmers of America (FFA). He also worked for the Cooperative Grange League Federation Exchange (1943-48) and taught vocational agriculture at the Waterloo (N.Y.) Central School.

He was a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca for the more than 54 years, and he served as a deacon and an elder there. He also served on the advisory board of the Salvation Army.

He was a past master of Hobasco Lodge No. 716 of the Free and Accepted Masons. He served as board president of HOMES Inc., and he was a long-time member of City Club in Ithaca.

He was predeceased by his first wife, Esther G. Martin, and a granddaughter, Melissa Peverly. He is survived by his wife Margaret (Mig) Kramer Martin; a son, Stephen Martin of New Orleans; a daughter, Jeanne Prosser of Berthoud, Colo.; a brother, Robert Martin of Rush, N.Y.; four step-children, eleven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Cornell Wrestling, Athletics Development Office, Teagle Hall, Ithaca, N.Y., 14853; to the First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca, 315 North Cayuga St., Ithaca, N.Y., 14850; or to Hospicare, 172 King Road East, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.

A remembrance service honoring Maurice F. Neufeld, emeritus professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, will be held Friday, June 6, at 3 p.m. in the Colbert Auditorium, 105 Ives Hall. A reception will immediately follow the service in the Doherty Lounge, 280 Ives Hall.

Neufeld, who died April 10 of this year in Ithaca, was a founding faculty member of the ILR School in 1945. He chaired the committee that governed the school in the interim between its first and second deans in 1946-47. "Neufeld played a key role in developing a broad and rich curriculum at the ILR School that continues to influence curricular decisions today," said ILR Dean Edward Lawler.

Neufeld was a teacher and mentor to Cornell students for 35 years as well as a scholar on comparative labor movements. He also helped establish the ILR School's extension division, taught some of its off-campus courses and served a succession of deans and the university in a variety of administrative posts. In 1976, he received the ILR School's Excellence in Teaching Award. "Teaching is what this college is all about to Professor Neufeld," one former student related at the awards ceremony. That same year, Neufeld stepped down from active faculty duties but continued to research and write.

Neufeld attended the University of Wisconsin, earning his doctorate in American history in 1935. In college, he studied Athenian and American societies in-depth and mastered Greek well enough to produce an English verse translation of Sophocles' "Antigone" that was published in Classics in Translation, Vol. I in 1952.

After college Neufeld taught, did labor organizing and worked for New Jersey's state planning board, followed by service as New York state's deputy commissioner of commerce. During World War II, he was director of rationing for New York and chaired a federal advisory council of defense planning committee before serving in the U.S. Army as an executive officer of the allied military government in Italy. While at Cornell he served on panels of arbitrators and was the industrial relations adviser to the Xerox Corp. Locally, he served on the Tompkins County Public Library's board of trustees.

Neufeld was the author of more than 35 books and articles, including Poor Countries and Authoritarian Rule (ILR School, 1965) and A Representative Bibliography of American Labor History (ILR Press, 1983). His last publication, Industrial Relations at the Dawn of the New Millennium (ILR School, 1998), was co-written with ILR co-founder and long-time colleague Jean McKelvey.

Donations in Neufeld's memory may be made to the Hinda and Maurice Neufeld Founders Professorship, c/o the ILR School Office of the Dean, 309 Ives Hall.

For more information on the service of remembrance, call Marsha Cox at 255-2185.

Oscar Rothaus, professor of mathematics, who as part of a once-classified Cold War-era research team that helped develop the Hidden Markov Model, a now ubiquitous mathematical tool used in many ways, from speech recognition systems to analyzing DNA, died in Ithaca May 24. He was 75.

When Rothaus worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, N.J., in the early 1960s, he was part of the Communication Research Division that developed the Hidden Markov Model, or HMM. This very flexible model provides a mathematical tool that simulates physical processes.

The HMM helped to usher in an era of high technology, as its uses include allowing scientists to determine probabilities and to improve positron emission tomography (PET) scans. HMM also allows scientists to compare strands of DNA with an entire genetic library. The mathematical model is used in computerized speech recognition systems and it could have future uses in the analysis of robotics and as an aid in musical analysis.

His other mathematical research included combinatorics and coding theory, lie and Jordan algebra, and Sobolev and Log-Sobolev inequalities.

A native of Baltimore, Rothaus earned his bachelor's (1948), master's (1950) and doctoral (1958) degrees from Princeton University. He served in the U.S. Army in the Signal Corps during the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. From 1953 to 1960, he was a mathematician at the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. He joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1960, becoming its deputy director in 1963. He became a visiting professor of mathematics at Yale University in 1965.

Rothaus joined the Cornell faculty as a professor in 1966 and served as the mathematics department chair from 1973 to 1976. In the fall of 1995, he assumed the position of acting department chair. In addition to his faculty post at Cornell, Rothaus was a visiting professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Strasbourg in France and the King's College in London.

He is survived by his wife, Tobe Barban; his daughters Carla of Brookline, Mass., Ruth Caston of Davis, Calif., and Tamar, of Buffalo; and five grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations be sent to the Cornell Plantations.