William C. Waterhouse

William Charles Waterhouse (December 31, 1941 – June 26, 2016) was an American mathematician. He was a professor emeritus of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, The early part of his career was at Cornell University.

Early life and education Waterhouse was born in Galveston, Texas, on December 31, 1941, the son of William T. Waterhouse and Grace D. Waterhouse, His father was an engineer who was employed with the United States Bureau of Reclamation. As a senior, he took the Scholastic Aptitude Test and received a near-perfect 797 on the verbal portion and a perfect 800 on the math portion. Time magazine ran a profile of him as well. Waterhouse received the National Merit Scholarship and the General Motors Scholarship; as a junior in the 1961 competition, he attained the highest individual level – a top-five score – while helping his Harvard team to a fourth-place finish overall; and as a senior in the 1962 competition, he again was a Putnam Fellow with a top-five score and helped his Harvard team to a third-place finish overall.

After graduating from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Waterhouse continued at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences where he received a master's degree.

Waterhouse remained an assistant professor at Cornell until 1975, at which point he was appointed an associate professor at Penn State. At Penn State, he subsequently became a full professor. They lived in State College, Pennsylvania. Telegraphic Reviews characterized the work as a "fairly intuitive and accessible" development of the topic, suitable for second-year graduate students. In a 1986 volume for Springer-Verlag, he edited the 1966 translation by Arthur A. Clarke of Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Waterhouse and his wife collaborated on several translations of works by German mathematicians. He was a member of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society. He published a number of entries about language- and classics-focused matters in the journal Notes and Queries, as well as, in the journal Classical World, an exegesis of an unusual word form found in Ovid's Amores. Waterhouse also had an interest in investigating quotations, whether via a Usenet newsgroup or publishing with The Skeptics Society.

By 2012, Waterhouse had moved to emeritus status.

Waterhouse died on June 26, 2016, in State College, Pennsylvania.

Awards and honors Waterhouse twice won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America, given to authors of articles of expository excellence. The first was in 1984 for his paper "Do Symmetric Problems Have Symmetric Solutions?" and the second was in 1995 for his paper "A Counterexample for Germain". The latter has been characterized as "a historical and mathematical detective story" that investigated an aspect of the correspondence between Carl Friedrich Gauss and Sophie Germain, a French mathematician who used a pseudonym to disguise the fact that she was a woman. According to his obituary, Waterhouse had a special pride in having won the two Lester R. Ford Awards.