Campus mourns
passing of four faculty members
Posted June 7, 2000
Lucien Le Cam
Lucien Le Cam, one of the handful of men who developed the modern theory of statistics, died April 25, at Doctor's Medical Center in San Pablo, at the age of 75.
Le Cam, an emeritus professor of statistics and mathematics, succumbed from a liver problem he developed within the past year.
Le Cam was born in Croze Creuse, France, on Nov. 18, 1924, and attended the University of Paris, where he obtained his Licence es Sciences in 1945. After graduate studies in Paris, he worked as an applied statistician for Electricite de France in Paris from 1945 to 1950. He moved permanently to Berkeley in 1950, leaving only once, from 1972 to 1973, to serve as director of the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques at the Universite de Montreal. Though he retired in 1991, he remained active in the department until the day he became ill.
Le Cam joined the statistics department in the 1950s, when the department was known around the world for its mathematical approach to the field of statistics.
Le Cam loved working with students, continuing to mentor them until the time he fell ill. "His door was always open, and he was very generous with his time," said Grace Yang, a former student.
Upon his retirement from Berkeley, he was awarded the prestigious Berkeley Citation.
A resident of Kensington, Le Cam is survived by his wife of 48 years, Louise Romig Le Cam; his daughter, Linda Le Cam, of Santa Barbara; two sons, Denis of Washington, D.C., and Steven of Reno, Nev.; and a brother, Jean Le Cam, of Felletin, France.
A ceremony in remembrance of Le Cam is planned for early fall at Berkeley.
Garrett Eckbo
Garrett Eckbo, a landscape architect whose work on new towns, gardens, homes, parks and other public spaces made him a leader of the modern landscape movement, has died at the age of 89.
"Certainly, he's one of the stellar figures of this century in the field," said professor Linda Jewell.
A campus memorial service, planned for November 12, will coincide with a landscape architecture symposium on the campus where he taught and chaired the landscape architecture department.
Eckbo's best known works include housing for migrant farmworkers in the 1940s, the plaza in Old Monterey, Berkeley's waterfront; and "firsts" such as the downtown pedestrian mall in Fresno.
Eckbo earned his bachelor's degree in landscape design from Berkeley in 1935, after transferring from Marin Junior College in Kentfield. He received a master's degree in landscape architecture at Harvard in 1938.
Eckbo was a founding partner in Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in San Francisco before going into solo practice. He joined the landscape architecture faculty at Berkeley in 1965 and served as department chairman for four years. He taught until 1978.
He is survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland, daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angles, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Deane Furman
Deane Philip Furman, a distinguished parasitologist and professor emeritus of entomology, died May 18, at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. He was 84 and had been experiencing declining health for more than a year.
Over the course of his career, Furman, who lived in Kensington, studied the management and control of arthropods, a group of organisms that encompasses 90 percent of all animals and includes insects.
Furman joined the Department of Entomological Sciences in 1946. He served a term as chairman of the Division of Parasitology from 1963 to 1970 and as chairman of the Division of Parasitology and Entomology from 1973 to 1975. Furman retired from Berkeley in 1982, but returned two years later to serve until 1987 as associate dean for academic affairs at the College of Natural Resources.
"He served with distinction and did an exceptional job. He was always a very fair person, very even-handed. He held the high esteem of all his colleagues, and you could always seek counsel from him," said professor Robert Lane.
Furman was born in Richardton, N.D., in 1915. He received a bachelor's degree from Berkeley in 1937 before going to UC Davis for his doctoral degree, which he obtained in 1942. He subsequently served in the 40th Malaria Survey Unit of the U.S. Army for four years.
Upon his retirement, he remained active in fishing, hunting, hiking and traveling.
He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Katherine Furman; sons Philip Deane of Jerome, Idaho, and Bryan Dale of Hydesville, Calif.; and daughter Lynne A. Ladwig of Chico, Calif.
Paul Wendt
Paul Wendt, a co-founder of the real estate program,, and one of the first scholars to apply modern finance theory to real estate has died at the age of 91.
Wendt was one of the most important figures in real estate finance in the past century, said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at the Haas School of Business.
Wendt was a native of New York City who earned his Ph.D. attending Columbia University primarily at night while working on Wall Street, recalled Wendt's former Haas School colleague Sherman Maisel. Wendt served as an officer in the U.S. Navy in WWII and came to Berkeley in 1946 as a lecturer.
At the same time, California's population was expanding quickly. Gov. Earl Warren and University of California President Robert Sproul agreed to a state real estate industry request to use some funds generated by real estate license fees to support an urban research program, along with real estate training and education. Wendt was asked to head the program and became its chairman in 1947, the same year he was appointed assistant professor.
"His footsteps are all around the Bay Area, believe me," said Leon Rimov, a Berkeley resident who had Wendt on his thesis committee while at the business school in the 1950s. Wendt died on May 14 in Chapala, Mexico, where he and his late wife, Alice, had lived since 1983, dividing their time between homes in California and south of the border.
He is survived by his son, Peter Wendt, and daughter, Susan Shoemaker, both of Oregon.
June 7 - July 11,
2000 (Volume 28, Number 34)
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