Caltech Remembers Longtime Mathematics Professor Richard Dean

Richard Albert Dean (BS '45), a professor of mathematics at Caltech from 1955 to 1987, passed away on January 27, 2022, at the age of 97. Dean was born in 1924 in Columbus, Ohio. He earned an undergraduate degree from Caltech in 1945 and a PhD from Ohio State University in 1953. He taught mathematics at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1947. Dean returned to Caltech in 1954 as the Harry Bateman Research Fellow before joining the faculty as an assistant professor in 1955. Dean was named associate professor in 1959, professor in 1966, and professor emeritus in 1987. Dean's achievements in mathematics include showing that the word problem in a finite presented lattice (a certain type of algebraic structure coming from order theory) is solvable.