1942-2004

Phil Huneke was a creative mathematician, a dedicated teacher and superb colleague. He was a member of the Ohio State University mathematics department for 35 years until his retirement in April 2004 and subsequent appointment as Emeritus Professor.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Wesleyan University in 1967, Phil accepted a two year appointment as Dunham Jackson Research Instructor at the University of Minnesota. He spent the remainder of his career at Ohio State, serving as Vice Chair of Mathematics from 1979 to 1995. In 1999 he received the Department of Mathematics Teaching and Service Award and, in 2003, the Roselene Sedgwick Faculty Service Award for outstanding service to Arts and Sciences undergraduates.

Phil was a mathematician who solved concrete problems that required both insight and careful attention to detail. He is best known for solving the Isbell problem by constructing an example of two commuting self-maps of the closed unit interval that fail to have a common fixed point, and for the projective analogue of Kuratowski's theorem by determining the complete list of 103 graphs that are the topological obstructions to embedding a finite graph in the real projective plane.

He was also a splendid teacher of mathematics. Phil directed or co-directed the doctoral dissertations of Chin San Wang (1975), Richard Decker (1978), Dan Archdeacon (1980), Bruce Burdick (1985), Joe Fiedler (1988) and Amy Hlavacek (1997). During the period 1989 to 1995 he was deeply involved with the Young Scholars Project, a pre-college summer program for minority students. Throughout his career Phil contributed greatly to curriculum development, experimented with new teaching methods and advocated for tutoring, mentoring and other support services for undergraduates.

Phil died Friday October 1, 2004 of cancer. He was devoted to his family and is survived by his wife Barbara, children Charlie, Heidi, Helen and Harriet, and eight grandchildren.