Dr. C. Dwight Lahr ('66, PBK 2001)

Dartmouth College Professor of Mathematics Dwight Lahr didn’t realize until recently that there are 12,335 references to him on the Dartmouth website, most of them having to do with his innovative teaching methods and his fields of specialization in functional analysis and educational computing. He insists that much of his interest in math today can be traced directly back to one teacher who made a real difference in his life. Mrs. Hillman, who taught math at Roosevelt Junior High School in Philadelphia, recognized his aptitude for math and placed him in an academically advanced class. “It was the beginning of a wonderful time for me. I owe her a lot,” he admits.
In his senior year at Central High School, Harvard and Temple were among the schools wooing the budding young academic. He had a scholarship in his pocket. He could have gone anywhere. “Temple University was a better match because most of the students were from working class families, as I was.” And he liked the idea that he could walk to campus from his home on Bouvier Street between 17th and 18th and Susquehanna and Dauphin. It was clear from the start that math was going to be his major at Temple. Why math? “I decided on math because there is no ambiguity between right and wrong.” He has never looked back.
In 1966, during that summer right after his graduation from Temple and before going off to Syracuse University for his PhD, Lahr worked at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station, where he solidified his interest in working with computers. After working as a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, he taught for a year as a visiting professor at Amherst College. In 1975, he joined the mathematics department at Dartmouth where he has been ever since. In addition to his teaching and research, he has held a variety of administrative posts, including Associate Dean for Sciences, Dean of Graduate Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—the first African- American Dean of Faculty in the Ivy League, and the only tenured African- American mathematics professor in the Ivy League.
Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Lahr has maintained a particular interest in improving mathematics and science education. He has been involved in curricular innovation at the undergraduate level ranging from courses in introductory calculus to a course in mathematical literacy for humanities and social science students. Perhaps the most rewarding project of his career is his design and creation of an institute at Dartmouth that brought urban and rural public secondary school teachers to campus in the summers to train them in new modes of learning and teaching in a computer- rich environment. The ultimate goal of his institute was to make a positive impact on the lives of African American and Hispanic high school students.
Dr. Lahr is currently working on a project with scholarsfirst.com that will put Advanced Placement courses into urban high schools across the nation via the Internet. He is heading up the calculus segment and intends to make use of his new book Principles of Calculus Modeling: An Interactive Approach, which comes complete with videos and on-line homework.
Making a difference in so many lives. Professor Lahr has built an extraordinary career at Dartmouth and a solid reputation in the scholarly community. We are grateful and proud to know that he thanks Temple for providing, as he says, “so many opportunities, so many courses to someone who was so eager to learn and interested in knowing what was outside, beyond.”

From CLA Perspectives Spring 2002