Lawrence A. Zalcman ’65
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July-August 2023
Lawrence A. Zalcman ’65 died May 31, 2022. He came to Dartmouth from Kansas City, Missouri, and was an honors math major. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. He taught at Stanford University and the University of Maryland, finally joining Bar-Ilan University (Jerusalem) in 1985 for the remainder of his career. A fellow professor there described Larry as “a remarkable mathematician and a wonderful person who was always ready and happy to help his colleagues.” He made several notable discoveries in complex and harmonic analysis, including the Zalcman Lemma on normal families of meromorphic functions, which has become a part of the curriculum of most undergraduate complex analysis courses, and a two circles theorem. His expository articles (mostly published in The American Mathematical Monthly) became popular and influential. Larry also wrote and published scholarly articles on the Bible and the prose of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. For more than 30 years he was the editor-in-chief of Journal d’Analyse Mathematique. He dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and effort to boosting and maintaining the level of mathematics and exposition of its contents. Larry is survived by his wife, Adrienne, and children Joel and Shulamit.