Arunas Liulevicius taught mathematics for 50 years at the University of Chicago, where he twice earned the school’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
“You don’t have to be an expert in large numbers to count the number of people who won two of these awards,” said colleague Robert Fefferman, the Max Mason distinguished service professor of mathematics at the university and former chair of the mathematics department. “The fact that since 1938 (when the award was established) he was one of a handful of professors of all departments in the university to win this award twice says something about the quality of his teaching.”
Liulevicius, 84, died of complications of Lewy body dementia in NHC Place Farragut in Knoxville, Tenn., according to his son Vejas. He lived for many years in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side and then Lisle, before moving first to Minnesota and then last year to Knoxville to be closer to his sons.
Liulevicius was born in 1934 in Sakiai, Lithuania, where both his parents taught in the local high school. In 1944, the family fled Lithuania, eventually living in displaced persons camps in Germany after the end of World War II, his son said. In 1949, they came to the U.S., settling in Chicago.
After graduating from Thomas Kelly High School in Brighton Park, Liulevicius began studies at the University of Chicago, where he got an undergraduate degree in mathematics and then went on to earn a mathematics doctorate in the field of algebraic topology in 1960.
He told family members algebraic topology is “math at its purest form,” an area, he said, where math verges on poetry.
U. of C. colleague Peter May said in an email that, in broad terms, topology is the study of spaces and their shapes. “The study has practical applications to data analysis, for example, understanding the shapes of tumors from the data points given by MRIs,” he said.
After fellowships at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies and with the National Science Foundation, Liulevicius returned to the University of Chicago in 1963 as an assistant professor, the beginning of a distinguished teaching career that stretched to his retirement in 2013.
May said Liulevicius could be overly modest about his own strengths in mathematics. “Arunas was a far stronger mathematician than he himself understood,” May said in an email, calling him “… diffident to a fault.”
May also noted how unusual it is for a teacher to win the Quantrell Award twice, as Liulevicius did in 1966 and 1988. “He loved teaching and he loved students,” May said. “He was unfailingly kind and friendly to everyone.”
Jay Woldenberg took honors algebra with Liulevicius in the 1985-86 school year. “I and some others spent a lot of time with him during office hours, during which he patiently went through a lot of the material a second time,” Woldenberg said in an email.
Woldenberg recalled an example of both his professor’s humor and his modesty. “(It was a) long proof one day that encompassed several large blackboards. He looked it over, went to an earlier board, made a minor modification, and said, ‘I don’t want the janitor to be confused later.’ ”
Vejas Liulevicius said his father had a repertoire of sayings — “Arunas-isms” — he used to make higher math fun. A pair that are understandable outside the math world included telling his students, “When I wave my fingers like this, it’s called proof by hypnosis; when I raise my voice, it’s called proof by intimidation.”
Even after retiring from undergraduate and graduate teaching, he continued to work with the university’s Young Scholars Program for promising mathematics students in grades six to 12. The program’s unofficial motto, his son said, was “You will be confused after you leave this course, but at a higher level.”
Liulevicius was active in the Lithuanian American community, taking a role as Lithuania strove to regain independence. After the 1991 Soviet crackdown in the capital city of Vilnius, where unarmed protesters were killed, he co-edited a book, “The Gift of Vilnius: A Photographic Document in Defense of Freedom,” to spread word of the crisis, his son said. When Lithuania’s President Vytautas Landsbergis visited Chicago in May 1991 to appeal for international support, Liulevicius was among the organizers accompanying him to media appearances, his son said.
“In terms of being a colleague, you just cannot do better,” Fefferman said. “Just a wonderful person.”
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Ausrele; another son, Gytis; a sister, Saule Palubinskas; and three grandchildren.
Services have been held.
Graydon Megan is a freelance reporter.
