EUGENE–University of Oregon President Emeritus Paul Olum, 82, died Friday, Jan. 19, of Lewy-body disease at Brittany Healthcare in Natick, Mass.

A mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project, Dr. Olum became the university’s 13th President in April 1981 after serving nine months as acting president. He retired in 1989.

Funeral services and burial will take place Wednesday, Jan. 24. The funeral will be held at 1 p.m. at Beall Concert Hall, 961 E. 18th Ave. A campus memorial service will be held at 4 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 25 in the Paul Olum Atrium, Willamette Hall, 1371 E. 13th Ave., at the University of Oregon.

"From the time I first met Paul Olum, when he became the university’s provost in 1976, I was impressed by his keen intelligence, human openness and unflinching integrity," recalls UO President Dave Frohnmayer, then serving as special legal assistant to the president. "Those qualities continued to exemplify his character and his service throughout his years as university president and beyond. Oregon and the world mourn the loss of a truly great man."

Dr. Olum was an immensely popular president. When the Oregon Board of Higher Education announced in 1987 that it would not renew his contract, effectively retiring Olum three years earlier than he and his supporters had expected, his many fans voiced their unhappiness. Thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni and a number of local and state leaders petitioned the board and then the Governor to reconsider the decision. Students held mass demonstrations and the University Assembly, the faculty governing body, voted unanimously to ask the board to reconsider.

After the death of his wife Vivian in 1986 and following his retirement from the university in 1990, Dr. Olum moved to Athens, Greece to be with his friend Margarita Papandreou, former wife of the Greek prime minister. In 1996, he returned to the states to live with his son Ken in Sharon, Mass.

In 1990, Dr. Olum received the Distinguish Service Award, at that time it was the highest honor awarded by the UO faculty.

"I really believe he was the guiding light for the university during the dark days of the early 1980s," said UO Provost John Moseley, who served as vice president for research under Dr. Olum. "He kept us together and protected the quality of the university in the face of very serious budget cuts."

During his presidency, the university established 20 new research institutes and academic programs, which helped double the UO’s income from grants and contracts. He also presided over what Sen. Mark Hatfield described as the "most significant construction program in the university’s history." The largest projects included the $45.6 million science complex, the $9 million remodeling and expansion of Lawrence Hall and the $27 million expansion and remodeling of the Knight Library.

Riverfront Research Park began as a brain child of then UO President Paul Olum and Eugene city Manager Mike Gleason. Their idea was to combine public incentives with university expertise to create jobs and foster diversification of the historically timber-dependent Lane County economy.

These accomplishments of the Olum presidency came despite the recession the Oregon economy was battling when Dr. Olum became acting president two decades ago. During the next five years, the University faced a series of major budget cuts. Of all the achievements during his presidency, however, Olum often said he was most proud of the way the faculty and staff enabled the university to withstand those cuts without losing quality.

After working on the development of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., as a young theoretical physicist, Dr. Olum became an ardent anti-nuclear spokesman. In 1983, Dr. Olum attended a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the creation of the Manhattan project. He felt that nuclear weapons had become a threat to the future of humanity, and that the anniversary of their creation was not cause for celebration. He wrote and circulated a petition, which was signed by 70 of the original Manhattan Project scientists, calling on the nations of the world to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.

He also has been active with the World Hunger Committee and the World Ecology Committee and has been director for Birth to Three, a nationally recognized child abuse and neglect prevention program that provides and training support to young families. Dr. Olum’s late wife, Vivian, helped found the organization.

Dr. Olum was born in 1918 in Binghamton, N.Y. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1940, and received his M.A. from Princeton in 1942. From 1943 to 1945 he worked as a theoretical physicist on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. After the war, he returned to Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1947.

Dr. Olum was professor of mathematics at Cornell University from 1949 until 1974, when he became dean of natural sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1976, he joined the University of Oregon as provost and later was appointed president. Throughout his career, he retained his position as professor of mathematics. He held a number of postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford, including a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford in 1966-67.

Dr. Olum is survived by his daughter Joyce Galaski, her husband Philippe, their children Rebecca, Deborah, and Aviva, of Amherst, Mass.; by his son, Ken Olum of Sharon, Mass.; and by Geoff Lightfoote of Ithaca, N.Y., his late daughter Judith’s husband.

The family suggests that donations in his memory may be made to Birth to Three, 86 Centennial Loop, Eugene, Ore. 97401 or the Paul Olum Endowment Fund, University of Oregon Foundation, P.0. Box 3346, Eugene, Ore. 97403-0346. The Paul Olum Endowment Fund was established this past fall by the Olum Family with the goal of ultimately endowing a faculty position in the UO Department of Mathematics.

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