Maurice H. Heins

Heins, Maurice H. Professor Maurice H. Heins of Deephaven, MN passed away on June 4, 2015 at the age of 99. He was born in Boston, MA on November 19, 1915, the third son of Samuel and Rachel Heins. As a boy, he attended Boston Latin School where he began his lifelong enjoyment of Greek and Latin literature, then attended Harvard College where he majored in Mathematics, graduated first in his class in 1937, and won a fellowship for a year of travel to mathematical centers in Europe. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1939. He was a highly prolific scholar and enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia. His research interests were varied, but focused primarily on complex and harmonic analysis. He was the author of close to 100 research papers, published in the most prestigious journals, and three textbooks on complex analysis. He is especially known for his work on so-called Hardy classes of functions defined on Riemann surfaces and on conformal metrics. Known for his kind and gentle demeanor, Professor Heins was widely sought as a mentor and advisor. He was the thesis advisor for some nineteen students over the course of his long career. In 1940, he married Hadassah Wagman (Radcliffe 1939), and they moved to Princeton, New Jersey where Maurice conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study as an assistant to Marston Morse, one of his teachers at Harvard. He returned to the Institute to conduct his own research in 1956. Professor Heins held academic positions at three major research universities: Brown University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maryland at College Park, where he was recruited to a distinguished chair professorship. He was invited to visiting positions and to give lectures at the major mathematics research centers in the United States and Europe, including the University of California Berkeley, Imperial College, London and the University of Paris. His long career also included stints at the Illinois Institute of Technology; a period at the Pentagon; and research and teaching for brief periods in Helsinki, Stockholm, Wurzberg, and Zurich. After retiring from his professorship at the University of Maryland, he continued to pursue his research interests, publishing papers into the 1990s. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the initial class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. He is survived by his wife of 75 years, Hadassah Wagman Heins, of Deephaven, MN; son Samuel Heins and his wife Stacey Mills of Wayzata, MN; daughter Sulamith Heins Potter of Olympia, WA; grandchildren Elizabeth Potter Scully, Madeleine Heins Israelson, Noah Potter, and Nora Heins Murray; and several great-grandchildren. Funeral service at 12:00pm, Monday, June 8 at Adath Yeshurun Cemetery, 5605 France Ave. S., Edina, MN. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that any memorials be made to Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota in St. Paul; The Ploughshares Fund in San Francisco; or the Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis, MN. Hodroff-Epstein 612-871-1234 hodroffepstein.com

Published on June 7, 2015