Dear colleagues,

I’m sorry to report the death of Arunas Leonardas Liulevicius, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics, at the age of 85. I unfortunately did not know him personally, but I am very interested to learn about him, if only for the title of his The Factorization of Cyclic Reduced Powers by Secondary Cohomology Operations, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 1962. He also published On Characteristic Classes, lectures given at the Nordic Summer School of Mathematics, in June of 1968, Algebraic Topology (edited by him), Proceedings of symposia in pure mathematics, vol. xxii, in 1971, Characteristic Classses and Cobordism, lecture notes series, in 1967, and Cobordism and Homology in 1969.  Cobordism is a fundamental equivalence relation on the class of compact manifolds of the same dimension, set up using the concept of the boundary (French bord, giving cobordism) of a manifold. Cohomology, specifically in homology theory and algebraic topology, is a general term for a sequence of abelian groups associated to a topological space, often defined from a cochain complex (i.e., an algebraic structure that consists of a sequence of abelian groups (or modules) and a sequence of homomorphisms). An abelian group in abstract algebra, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, these are the groups that obey the axiom of commutativity.

Professor Liulevicius received the PhD from the University of Chicago in 1960. His field was Algebraic Topology. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, from September 1961 to June 1962. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1961 and a Sloan Fellowship in 1967 to 1968.

-David Bevington, Secretary of Faculty Emeriti and co-chair of the Emeriti Steering Committee

Read memories of Professor Liulevicius via Dignity Memorial.