Griffith Baley Price

Services for Griffith Baley Price, 101, of Lawrence, will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at First Baptist Church. Private burial will be Sunday in Memorial Park Cemetery in Clinton, Miss.Mr. Price died Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, at Lawrence Presbyterian Manor.He was born March 14, 1905, in Brookhaven, Miss., the son of Walter Edwin and Lucy Lulie Baley Price. He graduated from Mississippi College in 1925 and completed a doctorate in mathematics at Harvard University in 1932.He taught for a short time at Brown University and in 1937 joined the faculty of Kansas University, where he taught until he retired in 1975. He served KU as chairman of the department of mathematics from 1951 to 1970. He worked with Mathematical Reviews in the 1940s and was active in the American Mathematical Society as its associate secretary from 1946 to 1949 and editor of the AMS Bulletin from 1950 to 1957.He served as a civilian member of the Operations Research Section of the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was involved in the New Math movement and established summer institutes for teachers. He was a vice president, president and member of the board of governors and a member of the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics for the Mathematics Association of America. Mr. Price served from 1959 to 1960 as the first chairman of the conference board of the Mathematical Sciences, where he was an executive secretary from 1960 to 1962. He was a U.S. delegate to UNESCO, taught as a visiting professor at Cal Tech and other universities and served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Argonne National Laboratories. He received the MAA’s Distinguished Service Award in 1970 and was named the first E.B. Stouffer distinguished professor of mathematics at KU.He was honored with an endowed chair in mathematics at KU. He also helped to establish the Cora Lee Beers Price Teaching Professorship of International Cultural Understanding at KU, G. Baley Price Spencer Research Library Graduate Fellowship at KU and a scholarship in his parents’ honor at Mississippi College.Mr. Price married Cora Lee Beers on June 18, 1940, in Janesville, Wis. She died in December 2004.Survivors include a son, Griffith B. Price Jr., Washington, D.C.; five daughters, Cora Lee Kluge, Madison, Wis., Lucy Jean Price and Edwina Eisert, both of Lawrence, Diane Fukunaga, Shawnee, and Doris Burgert, Wichita; 14 grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and many relatives and friends.The family will receive friends from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. today at the church.The family suggests memorials to a charity of the donor’s choice, sent in care of Rumsey-Yost Funeral Home.