Jerome Levine, a mathematics professor who made groundbreaking advances in knot theory, died April 8 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston after a nine-month battle with lymphoma. He was 68."He had, in mathematics, a long career doing first-rate work," Prof. Daniel Ruberman (MATH), a longtime colleague, said. "He kept working at a high level for a long time. It was pretty inspiring, and a lot of people felt that way."

Throughout his career, Professor Levine made significant contributions to the field of knot theory, a mathematical study of curves in three-dimensional space and the way knots can be created with such curves. Many of the earliest advances in applying algebraic techniques to knot theory came courtesy of his research.

Professor Levine was born in New York City in 1937, and received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958, the same year he and his wife Sandra were married. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1961.

He returned to MIT to teach from 1961 to 1963, before receiving a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study at the University of Cambridge from 1963 to 1964.

Professor Levine taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 to 1969. He then came to Brandeis, and except for a year as a visiting instructor at the University of Oxford and a semester at the University of Geneva, Professor Levine taught here for the rest of his career.

"He was really happy here," said Ruberman, who credits Professor Levine with helping bring him to Brandeis. "I think he and his generation of faculty in the math department, and I think in other departments as well, built Brandeis by, in effect, lending their weight to the enterprise. These were people who really could have gone anywhere. They believed in the idea that Brandeis promoted a small place where you could still do first-rate research and still have a first-rate intellectual life."

Professor Levine served as chair of the mathematics department twice, first from 1974 to 1976, and later from 1988 to 1990. He won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1966, and he won the Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award in 1988.

Professor Levine took a leave of absence after being diagnosed with lymphoma last July.

"He had a sort of modesty to him and a gentleness to him that graduate students and mathematicians responded to," Ruberman said. "He was a lovely person."

In addition to his wife, Professor Levine is survived by two sons, Michael of Peaks Island, Maine; and Jeff of Somerville, Mass; a daughter, Laura '84 of Pawtuckett, R.I; and five grandchildren.



Editor's Note: This story originally stated that Levine's daughter Laura was a member of the Class of 1983. The Justice regrets the error.