Bertram Kostant
Bertram Kostant (May 24, 1928 – February 2, 2017) was an American mathematician. He was known for his works in Kostant partition function and Kostant–Parthasarathy–Ranga Rao–Varadarajan determinants. In 2016, he won the Wigner Medal. He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kostant was born in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the University of Chicago.
Kostant died at a rehabilitation center in Roslindale, Massachusetts on February 2, 2017 from stroke complications, aged 88.
Jiří Lanský
Jiří Lanský (17 September 1933 – 14 February 2017) was a Czech high jumper. He won silver medals at the 1954 and 1958 European Championships. He finished seventh at the 1960 Summer Olympics.
Lanský died in Prague, Czech Republic on 14 February 2017, aged 83.
Suthan Suthersan
Suthan Suthersan (10 June 1956 – 20 February 2017) was a Sri Lankan-American environmental engineer. He served as the Chief Technical Officer and Executive Vice President of Arcadis North America.
Suthersan was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He studied at the University of Peradeniya and at the University of Toronto.
Suthersan died on 20 February 2017 in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, aged 60.
Peter A. Diamond
Peter Arthur Diamond (born April 29, 1940) is an American economist. Diamond is known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s.
He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, along with Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides. He won the Prize for studying what happens when trading in markets is difficult. For example, because buyers and sellers need to find another before they can trade.
He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On June 6, 2011 he withdrew his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, citing intractable Republican opposition for 14 months.
Oliver E. Williamson
Oliver Eaton Williamson (September 27, 1932 – May 21, 2020) is an American economist. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a laureate of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Williamson died on May 21, 2020 in Oakland, California of pneumonia-related problems at the age of 87.
Tania Dalton
Tania Dalton (née Nicolson; 26 November 1971 – 1 March 2017) was a New Zealand international netball player. She was part of the 2003 Netball World Championships winning Silver Ferns squad. She made 12 caps for the Silver Ferns in total, playing in the positions of goal shooter (GS) and goal attack (GA).
Dalton was a member of the New Zealand national netball team, the Silver Ferns from 1996–2004 and 2006–07; she was also named in 2005 but was forced out through injury. She played domestic netball for the Northern Force from 1998 until 2000, and the championship-winning Southern Sting from 2002–2006.
After retiring from playing professional netball, she worked as a netball commentator on SKY Sports for international tests, the ANZ Championship and National Championships, alongside former internationals Anna Stanley, Natalie Avellino, Kathryn Harby-Williams and Bernice Mene.
Dalton is also a part owner of the franchise food outlet chain, Pita Pit New Zealand Limited.
Dalton collapsed on 23 February 2017 while playing a regular game of social touch rugby in her home town of Takapuna, Auckland. She was running at the time and was not injured in the game. She was immediately hospitalised in a critical condition with a ruptured internal carotid artery aneurysm. On 28 February 2017, her family turned off her life support. She died the next day, on 1 March, at the age of 45.
Preben Hertoft
Preben Hertoft (5 January 1928 – February 2017) was a Danish psychiatrist and professor in medical sexology, senior doctorate in medicine.
Hertoft worked over 40 years as a sexologist doing research, treatment, counseling and education.
In 1986 he founded the first medical centre for sexology in Denmark. Most of the time he had heterosexual and homosexual patients with sexual problems in therapy, but he also treated and counselled transvestites and pedophiles.
Eugene Garfield
Eugene Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. Garfield's work led to the development of several Information Retrieval algorithms, like HITS and Pagerank.
Garfield was born in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Garfield died on February 26, 2017 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from a heart attack, aged 91.
Garfield was born in 1925 in New York City as Eugene Eli Garfinkle, and was raised in a Lithuanian-Italian Jewish family.
He studied at the University of Colorado and University of California, Berkeley before getting a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1949. Garfield also received a degree in Library Science from Columbia University in 1953.
Working as a laboratory assistant at Columbia University after his graduation, Garfield indexed all previously synthesized compounds so that not to remake them, which helped him understand that his inclination to information towards science was bigger than towards chemistry.
In 1951, he got a position at the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where most of the National Library of Medicine information systems were developed.
In 1956, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISI formed a major part of the science division of Thomson Reuters.
Garfield is survived by a wife, three sons, a daughter, a step-daughter, two granddaughters, and two great-grandchildren.
Deaths in March 2017
The following is a list of notable deaths in March 2017. For notable deaths before the current month, please see "Previous months". Names under each date are reported in alphabetical order by last name or pseudonym. Deaths of non-humans are reported here also if notable.
Data matrix
Data matrix is an invention of a two-dimensional barcode.
The coded information can be text or numbers. It is read by a bar code reader.
Error correction codes are often used to increase reliability. Even if one or more cells are damaged, the message can still be read. A data matrix symbol can store up to 2,335 alphanumeric characters.
Beta ferrite
Beta ferrite is ferrite that is paramegnetic instead of ferromagnetic, heated to a temperature of above 771°C.
β-Fe may refer to an unproven to exist fifth allotrope of iron, only produced once in Uppsala University. Iron was compressed to 35-40 GPa then heated to 1500°K and scanned. The result was never reproduced.
Robin Stenuit
Robin Stenuit (born June 16, 1990 in Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve) is a Belgian road bicycle racer. His speciality is sprinting.
Participating in professional teams since 2011, Stenuit has been riding for Wanty-Groupe Gobert since 2016.
He achieved several victories, among others the Grand Prix de la ville de Nogent-sur-Oise and the Memorial Van Coningsloo, both in 2015.
Bloomery
A bloomery is a type of furnace that was once widely used for smelting oxides. Bloomeries were the first smelters able to smelt iron. The result of using a bloomery is a mass of iron and slag called a bloom. This is called sponge iron, because it is porous like a sponge. Sponge iron is usually refined into wrought iron. Bloomeries are no longer used in smelting, because blast furnaces are better.
A bloomery consists of a chimney with heat-resistant walls made of earth, clay, or stone. Near the bottom, pipes (made of clay or metal) enter through the side walls. The pipes allow air to enter.