Nicholas J. Rose

Nicholas J. Rose was born on April 21, 1924 just a few minutes from greater downtown Ossining, New York (population 15,000, mainly known as the home of Sing-Sing Prison). In 1941 He went to Stevens Institute of Technology, a small engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey. World War II broke out during his freshman year and the next year he signed up in the Navy V-12 program together with the vast majority of his classmates. This program trained students to be engineering officers while allowing them to finish college (the Navy paid the tuition). Students had the rank of apprentice seaman until they graduated and went through Officers Training school.

Rose became an officer and a gentleman in 1945 after four months at the Reserve Officer's Training School in Annapolis. He then completed Pre-Radar training at Bowdoin College in Maine. He was scheduled to go to Radar School at MIT but because the war ended, he was assigned to the Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington where he met his future wife Muriel, a Navy Nurse, They were married in October of 1946.

Rose obtained a position in the Mathematics Department at Stevens almost by accident. He intended to go to the placement office to look for a job in electronics. On his way there Rose met the Director of Admissions who informed him that they were looking for instructors to handle the large number of veterans who were taking advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. Anyone with a body temperature over 97 degrees would probably be accepted. Actually he had a choice of being an instructor in either Electrical Engineering or Mathematics. For some strange reason he chose Math, intending to pursue graduate work in electronics. He took some graduate courses in electronics along with some graduate math courses and after a year he gave up electronics and concentrated on Mathematics.

While trying to understand Calculus better for his teaching duties, Rose ran across Courant's classic volumes on Calculus. When he learned that Courant was at New York University (at what is now the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences) he transferred there and obtained a Masters degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. degree in 1956. He received the Outstanding Teacher Award in 1959. For many years he was a consultant for Bell Laboratories working on computer and control problems. One of his main contributions to Bell Laboratories was to convince them that putting money into developing a Digital Differential Analyzer (a bad digital imitation of the Vannevar Bush's analog Differential Analyzer) was a bad idea.

Rose became Head of The Mathematics Department at Stevens in 1960. During his tenure the department introduced a Ph.D. program, set up a new undergraduate science program and organized a large M.S. program for Bell Laboratories employees on the Stevens campus. Rose received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for 1967-68.

In 1968 He accepted a position as Head of the Math Department at North Carolina State University In Raleigh, North Carolina. The main reason he was considered for the position was Rose's friendship with Hans Sagan, who he had met at a control theory conference many years earlier. Upon arriving on the State campus, Rose was astonished to find that, with more than a hundred faculty and graduate assistants, there were only five telephones in the department. It took a major effort by him over several years to get a phone in every office. Other major accomplishments were to eliminate Saturday classes, to end the teaching of the slide rule in mathematics courses, and to promote the change of the name of the School of Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics to the School (now College) of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. During his tenure as head, 28 new faculty were hired, most of whom, for better or worse, remained at State for the rest of their careers. In 1978 he stepped down as department head to spend full time in teaching and a little research.

Besides's serving on a denumerably (perhaps) infinite number of committees, some other facts about Rose's career are:

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Department of Mathematics, Box 8205, NC State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8205