Obituary

Robert Peter Rich

Dr. Robert Peter Rich died on Sept. 11, 2007 in Austin, TX.  He was 88.

Dr. Rich was born on August 28, 1919 in Lowville, N.Y. to Charles William Rich and Agnes Keegan Rich.  He graduated in1936 from the Lowville Academy.  He went on to study literature, Latin and mathematics at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., receiving an A.B. in 1941.

Dr. Rich entered the United States Army in the summer of 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor.  He received his basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.  He served in Boston and then was sent to Europe.  He landed in Normandy soon after the Normandy Invasion began.  One of the things he was most proud of in his life was becoming a First Sergeant. 

When the war was over, Dr. Rich took advantage of the G.I. bill to return to school.  He moved to Baltimore, where he met Audrey Lois Fairley.  They were married in Millinocket, Maine in 1949.  They had two children, Elaine Alice Rich and David William Rich.

Dr. Rich received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins in 1950.  After graduation, he joined the technical staff of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he worked until his retirement in 1990.  Dr. Rich’s Ph.D. work was in theoretical mathematics but, throughout his career at the Lab, he chose to focus on a wide array of applied problems.  He began in operations research.  But when the Lab got its first computer in 1956, he took charge of its operation.  He directed the Lab’s computing center until 1985.  When he stepped down from that role, at age 65, he bought a C programming manual and went back to operations research.

Dr. Rich was fascinated by computation.  In the mid 1960’s he wrote a music generation program.  A few years later, he wrote a program to generate weaving patterns for the loom he’d built.  He wrote one of the first books on sorting algorithms. He built his own word processing system. He published papers on the design of early high-level programming languages, information retrieval, and mechanical proof testing.

In addition to directing the APL computing center, Dr. Rich established the computing center at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and served on the Medical School faculty as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.  He was president of the Maryland Academy of Sciences from 1967 to 1979, during the creation of the Maryland Science Center at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.  He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After he retired, Dr. Rich took up ballroom dancing and pursued it with his typical enthusiasm. He danced and he compiled an annotated bibliography of books on social dance.  He also collected the books, then donated the collection to the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas.

Dr. Rich is survived by his children, two grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.  We will miss him.  Requiescat in pace.

There will be funeral at St. Theresas Catholic Church in Austin on Tuesday, September 25 at 3PP. The burial at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery will be on Wednesday, September 26.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that donations be made to the Robert P. Rich Scholarship Fund at Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd., Clinton, NY 13323.  We also wish to give special thanks to Dr. Leanor Frierson-Stroud for everything she did for Dad while he was sick.