Mathematics professor, author, traveler

Alden French (A.F.) Pixley, longtime Claremont resident and Harvey Mudd mathematics professor, died on September 23 after a brief hospitalization. He was 96. Alden was born on February 27, 1928, the third of four children, in Pasadena to Nelson Pixley, who was city controller and subsequently tax assessor and collector and city treasurer, and Lillian (Parent) Pixley.

He went on to attend U.C. Berkeley, where he eventually, after serving in the Navy as an engineer officer in Hong Kong and Japan during the Korean conflict, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. He then taught at San Francisco State University and worked at IBM, where he specialized in computer applications for the petroleum industry.

While at IBM in San Francisco, he met Jean Marie Shipkey, a secretary at the company who was from Palo Alto. The couple wed on December 1, 1956, and were married for nearly 60 years, until Jean died in 2016. For the first few years of their marriage, they lived on Ulloa Street in San Francisco where, as they later said, “the sun came out two days a year.” During this time, they enjoyed sailing in the San Francisco Bay and had two children, Catherine (Kate) in 1958 and John in 1960.

In 1961, soon after Harvey Mudd College opened, the family moved to Claremont, where Alden joined the mathematics department and where they lived until returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, after 40 years in Claremont. A third child, Thomas (Tom), was born in 1965.

During his early years at Harvey Mudd, Alden concentrated on teaching and curriculum development and, in the late sixties, during the period of intense student unrest, was chairman of an all-Claremont Colleges committee tasked with helping the colleges collectively address issues tied to diversity on the campuses. He subsequently served as president of the newly-created Claremont Colleges Faculty Senate. After 1970 his interests focused more on his research activities, and except for a brief term as department chair, he thereafter served only on the standard college committees. Though Alden still devoted careful attention to his teaching and always found it satisfying, his research interests dominated. He made groundbreaking contributions to the field of universal algebra, an area of mathematics concerned with the most general, abstract properties of algebraic systems. He directed several Ph.D. dissertations but generally preferred mentoring talented undergraduates.

Beginning in 1971 with a visiting professorship with the family in Ferrara, Italy, Alden began traveling regularly to Europe for visiting appointments as well as sabbatical leaves, including with the family in London in 1976 and 1977. He considered himself fortunate to have participated in fruitful collaboration with several mathematicians in Eastern Europe during the last decades of the Cold War, and was instrumental in providing travel to the West for several of them. He visited Hungary most often and served as a National Academy of Sciences exchange fellow in Budapest. Several of his over forty publications were co-authored by Eastern European mathematicians.

In 1985 he began correspondence with Kalle Kaarli, a talented younger Estonian mathematician and, after laborious time-consuming exchanges of letters, in 1987 they published the first of what became a series of papers and also a book, which appeared in 2000. Upon his retirement from Harvey Mudd in 1998, Alden also relinquished his post on the editorial board of the journal Algebra Universalis in favor of Kalle Kaarli. He considered Kaarli to be the mathematician who most fully shared his intuitive understanding of the subject of polynomial completeness, which had recently been his dominant interest, and was pleased that he had enabled him to visit in the United States while Estonia was still a part of the Soviet Union, and that he had helped him achieve international stature. Their collaboration continued for several years and their last joint paper was published in 2018 when Alden was 90.

During his years at Harvey Mudd, Alden was known for riding his bicycle to work and for swimming with colleagues every day at noon, rain or shine, in the college pool. Also during their years in Claremont, Alden and Jean enjoyed entertaining at their home, and the family was involved in the Catholic community at the colleges’ McAllister Center and enjoyed going Christmas caroling with other colleges faculty families. The family enjoyed visiting his parents in Bass Lake, outside Yosemite, where his parents lived after his father retired. The family also enjoyed frequent visits to and extended stays in the Bay Area. Camping and backpacking were also favorite activities, along with going to the theater. Alden was also an avid reader in a wide range of non-mathematical topics and fiction.

After moving back to the Bay Area, Alden and Jean lived in Point Richmond, California and then moved to the Villa Marin retirement community in San Rafael. They also had a house at The Sea Ranch on the north Somona County coast. After Jean died, Alden began a friendship with Anne Irwin, a widowed resident of Villa Marin who is an artist and who graduated from USC, and the two married on May 21, 2022, when Alden was 94. Up until a few days before his death, Alden was enjoying hiking and cooking with Anne at The Sea Ranch.

In addition to Jean, Alden was predeceased by his older brother and sister, Nelson Jr. and Virginia MacAnulty. He is survived by his younger sister Susan in San Rafael; his second wife Anne; his children Kate (Anthony) Mirante in Petaluma, John in Claremont and Tom (Shaolan) in Shanghai, China; and his grandsons, Lucian in Thailand and Alden John (AJ), a student at Boston University. A memorial service will take place on November 9. For further information, please contact afpixleymemorial@gmail.com. Contributions may be made in his name to International House at U.C. Berkeley (https://ihouse.berkeley.edu/support-i-house) or Gualala Arts Chamber Music (P.O. Box 244, Gualala, CA 95445).