Obituary: Harry Coonce

Harry Bernard Coonce, founder of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP)—a popular online catalog of mathematics doctoral students and advisors—passed away on February 14, 2025. He was 86 years old.

Harry was born on March 19, 1938. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1969 under the direction of Malcolm Robertson. His dissertation—titled “A Variational Method for Functions of Bounded Boundary Rotation”—inspired a subsequent article on the same topic in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society several years later [1]. Harry’s impressive career included teaching positions at the United States Naval Academy and University of Kentucky, after which he found a long-term home at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

In the early 1990s, Harry realized that he had no idea who advised his Ph.D. advisor, and hence began a quest to discover this information. Gregarious by nature, he shared his progress with every new friend and acquaintance, which inspired him to create a central repository of doctoral advising relationships for mathematicians. The web was in its early stages of open usage at that time, and Harry—together with his wife Susan Schilling, a professor of computer science—conceived of a website that is now known as MGP. The MGP public site officially launched in 1997.

After retiring from his faculty position at Mankato in 1999, Harry continued to spread the word about his project by traveling to mathematics conferences throughout the country. A great lover of trains and road trips, he often used Amtrak—a U.S.-based passenger railroad network—to attend the Joint Mathematics Meetings. He happily drove to regional meetings on county roads or state highways, even when interstates and U.S. highways would have gotten him there faster. Harry’s vehicle bore the license plate EXP IPI for many years, which advertised his love of complex analysis. He regularly claimed that it was the only license plate in Minnesota with a negative number.

Harry collected much of the initial MGP data via hard work and some elbow grease. He borrowed dissertations from the University of Texas library while visiting his son Zac in Austin, and spent time at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute—now the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute—in Berkeley, Calif., where he transcribed data about mathematics Ph.D.s at the University of California, Berkeley, from index cards into the MGP database. Harry’s original goal was to catalog information for 10,000 mathematicians in MGP; by the time the project moved its home base from Mankato to North Dakota State University in 2002, it accounted for nearly 60,000 individuals.

As his health declined, Harry retired from MGP in 2009. At the time of his passing, this widely respected project contained information for more than 320,000 individuals in the mathematical sciences — a legacy of which Harry can be proud.

More information about the history of the very popular MGP is available in Notices of the American Mathematical Society [2, 3].

References
[1] Coonce, H.B. (1971). A variational method for functions of bounded boundary rotation. Trans. Am. Math. Soc., 157, 39-51.
[2] Jackson, A. (2007). A labor of love: The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Not. Am. Math. Soc., 54(8), 1002-1003.
[3] Mulcahy, C. (2017). The Mathematics Genealogy Project comes of age at twenty-one. Not. Am. Math. Soc., 64(5), 466-470.