Elliott Ward Cheney, Jr.

Elliott Ward Cheney Jr. (June 28, 1929 – July 13, 2016) was an American mathematician and an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Known to his friends and colleagues as Ward Cheney, he was one of the pioneers in the fields of approximation theory and numerical analysis. His 1966 book, An Introduction to Approximation Theory, remains in print and is "highly respected and well known", "a small book almost encyclopedic in character", and "is a classic with few competitors".

Education and personal life Cheney was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to E. W. Cheney Sr., and Carleton (Pratt) Cheney. He was the second of two children. He grew up in Washington, New Jersey, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Ward began clarinet studies at age ten and would play in chamber music groups throughout his life.

Cheney was a 1947 graduate of Fountain Hill High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1951, he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Lehigh University, where his father was a physics professor. During undergraduate summers, Ward worked for the United States Forest Service, where he met Elizabeth "Beth" Jean, whom he married in 1952. The young couple resided in Lawrence, Kansas, while Ward studied and served as a mathematics instructor at The University of Kansas, earning his Ph.D. in 1957. Ward had three children with his first wife, Beth, all of whom earned doctorates: daughter Margaret is a professor of mathematics, son David is a manager of international research projects, and son Elliott is a professional cellist. Their mother Beth remarried in 1975 and died in 1991. Ward and his wife Victoria had been together since 1983.

Professional background Following the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957, the United States intensified its focus on its aerospace program. Cheney became a research scientist at Convair Astronautics in San Diego, California, where his mathematical team worked on calculations for the Atlas rocket—which would take John Glenn into space.

Cheney also worked for Space Technology Laboratories (now TRW Inc.), near Los Angeles, and taught at UCLA, with visiting positions at Michigan State University and Iowa State University. In addition, Ward was a consultant and/or a guest worker at Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories, The Aerospace Corporation, and IBM Research Laboratory. In the summers of 1961–63, he was director of the NSF Summer Institute in Numerical Analysis at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Cheney supervised 17 PhD students,

Cheney was awarded grants for his research on approximation theory from the National Science Foundation, United States Air Force and United States Army as well as the UK Research Councils and the Italian Scientific Research Council, among others.

Cheney died in July 2016, after having had Alzheimer's disease for several years.

Books An Introduction to Approximation Theory, Ed. 2, American Mathematical Society Chelsea, 1982. Approximation Theory in Tensor Product Spaces (with Will Light), Springer, 1985. ; Multivariate Approximation Theory: Selected Topics, SIAM, 1986. (CBMS-NSF Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics 51) A Course in Approximation Theory (with Will Light), American Mathematical Society, 2000. , ; Analysis for Applied Mathematics, Springer Science+Business Media, New York, 2001. (eBook) Numerical Analysis: Mathematics of Scientific Computing, Ed. 3 (with David Kincaid), American Mathematical Society, 2002. ; 1st edition, 1992