Professor Emeritus Richard Carl Sacksteder of the CUNY Ph.D. Program in Mathematics passed away at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on Sunday, Nov. 4th, 2007 following a heart attack the previous evening at his home on the Upper West Side. Prof. Sacksteder was 79 years old. Though Prof. Sacksteder retired in the late 1990's, he still could often be found in his Graduate Center office discussing mathematics with students and faculty.
Prof. Sacksteder was a founding member of the CUNY Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in Mathematics. Over the years he supervised the dissertations of 13 CUNY doctoral students. As late as this year, Prof. Sacksteder was supervising the writing of a dissertation by a man whom he knew many years previously when they were undergraduates together at the University of Chicago.
Prof. Sacksteder earned his B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1948, and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1960 under Phil Hartman. His dissertation was entitled "On Local and Global Properties of Convex Sets and Hypersurfaces." Prof. Sacksteder's research interests included differential geometry, differential equations, dynamical systems, fluid dynamics, probability, and, in recent years, Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces. Prof. Sacksteder's contributions to Foliations were of considerable importance, and his knowledge of Differential Equations was encyclopedic.
He is survived by his wife, Martha Bixler, with whom he was married for 32 years; his daughters (from his first wife, Judith Cohen) Katherine Bryski of Brooklyn, New York, and Elizabeth Sacksteder of Westport, Connecticut, and four grandchildren.
Before joining the CUNY Doctoral Faculty in 1964, Prof. Sacksteder taught at Yale University, NYU's Courant Institute, and Columbia University. Prof. Emeritus Martin Moskowitz, a long-time colleague and friend, notes that "Dick's colleagues were always impressed by his strong sense of decency, remarkable level-headedness and extraordinary modesty."
A memorial gathering was held on Friday, November 30th, from 4:00 - 7:00 p.m. at the Yale Club of New York City (50 Vanderbilt Avenue).