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Obituaries

10 April 2002 |

Michael Laurie
Michael Laurie, professor emeritus in the Department of Landscape Architec-ture and a former chair of that department, has died at the age of 69.

Laurie, who specialized in design, the history of landscape architecture and landscape architecture education, had been a faculty member in the department since 1962, starting as a lecturer and becoming a full professor in 1979. He served as department chair from 1991 to 1998, and had been an emeritus professor since.

Laurie wrote “An Introduction to Landscape Architecture,” which addresses environmental quality and the interrelationships between large-scale landscape planning and urban design. The book is widely used around the world. He was co-editor, with Grace Hall, of “Gardens Are for People,” by Thomas Church.

In addition, Laurie had completed a two-part history of landscape architecture at Berkeley, covering the first 75 years of the department.

The native of Perthshire, Scotland, won the 1988 Outstanding Educator Award from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture in recognition of excellence in teaching, research and service to education.

Clare Cooper Marcus, a Berkeley emeritus professor of landscape architecture and architecture, said she arrived on campus as a graduate student in city planning about the same time Laurie began to lecture here and took some of his landscape architecture classes.

“He introduced me to design and looking at the visual world from a design and aesthetic point of view,” she said, adding that he encouraged her to teach a course on her research into how the designed environment influences human beings. She did, and continued to teach that and allied subjects for the rest of her career.

In recent years, he had a retirement cottage built near the coast of Scotland.

John Paterson
John Paterson, professor emeritus of English and an influential scholar on the evolution and cultural impact on the English novel, passed away March 29 at the age of 78.

In his scholarship and teaching, Paterson considered the novel to be a reflection of ordinary life and a kind of moral beacon for society. His particular focus was on the Edwardian period, but he encouraged his students to carry the analysis forward to modern American novelists such as Jack Kerouac.

Born in Scotland, Paterson moved to Canada at the age of two with his parents and grew up in Montreal, where he graduated in 1944 from McGill University. After earning a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, he taught briefly at Princeton University, then joined the Berkeley faculty in 1956. He retired to emeritus status in 1985.

Always a popular teacher, Paterson served for a time in the 1970s as a campus ombudsman, helping students solve problems in their academic lives. His devotion to fairness and justice also was reflected in his service on the board of the Berkeley chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

One of his major works, titled “The Novel as Faith: The Gospel According to James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf,” drew praise from the New Yorker magazine in 1974. “Mr. Paterson’s urbane, intellectually sophisticated work describes what six important novelists imagined the novel could do aesthetically and where its dignity might be found,” the magazine reported.

His final work, “Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1901-1914,” was completed after he retired and was published in 1996.

“He was a good teacher and a very fine scholar,” said Ralph Rader, professor emeritus of English, who joined the faculty at the same time as Paterson. The former chair of the English department recalled Paterson as sweet, self-deprecating and an avid golfer.

Robert Vaught
Robert Lawson Vaught, professor emeritus of mathematics, died April 2 after an extended illness. He was 75.

Vaught was widely regarded as one of the great pioneers in the field of model theory, one of the major branches of mathematical logic, and a field that applies ideas of traditional logic to the study of algebraic and other mathematical structures.

Born in Alhambra, Calif., in 1926, Vaught began his college studies in 1942 at Pomona College before leaving two years later for service in World War II. The U.S. Navy assigned him to the V12 program at Berkeley, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1945 before being sent to Midshipmen School at Cornell University in New York. He completed his naval service in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant and returned to Berkeley later for graduate studies.

After completing early research in mathematical analysis, Vaught became enthralled with a prominent logician, Alfred Tarski, and went on to finish his doctoral dissertation under him. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1954.

Vaught joined the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle, serving until 1958, when he accepted an invitation to return to Berkeley. He became a central member of a group of mathematicians, led by Tarski, who were about to bring Berkeley into world prominence as a center for research in mathematical logic. Vaught became a full professor in 1963, and taught until his retirement in 1991.

He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Amsterdam from 1956 to 1957 and a Guggenheim Fellow in Zurich in 1967. In 1978, he received the first Carol Karp Prize of the Association for Symbolic Logic for his work on the logic of infinitely long expressions.

In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that memorial contributions in Vaught’s name be made to a cause of the donor’s choice.

 


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