Introduction to the Festschrift

Abstract

In the year of his 75th birthday, colleagues, friends, students and family of Elwyn Simons gathered near Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for three days of conferences and gatherings celebrating his life and work. It was a wonderful time of scholarship and comradeship, and a great tribute to the man and scholar who has shaped many lives and much science in the more than a half century, to date, of his professional life. Elwyn LaVerne Simons was born July 14, 1930, at Lawrence, Kansas, a son of Verne Franklin Simons and Verna Irene Cuddeback. A Kansas native and the descendent of pioneers, Verne Franklin Simons spent his career as a professor of accounting and financial advisor, first at the University of Kansas, and from 1929 onward, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where Elwyn and his younger brother, Herbert were raised. Verna Cuddeback Simons, Elwyn’s mother, was herself the descendant of a pioneering Kansas family, and was an art student when she met Elwyn’s father. She devoted herself to family and beauty throughout her long life. Elwyn’s particular genius for original thinking about the natural world was evident very early in his life. His mother preserved many stories and artistic renderings centered on nature and animals that he began producing at around three years of age. Reading these stories, one is struck by the precocious evidence for a naturalborn natural scientist. Elwyn appreciated very early the importance of preserving the history of his family gleaned both from written records and from oral histories. These amazing and entertaining stories have been a great delight to hear told and retold, and the recordings Elwyn made as a youngster, of his grandparents singing folk songs on the porch of their farmhouse in their final years, are a true treasure of American history (see http://www.ils.unc.edu/dpr/ archives/folksongs/). Elwyn Simons attended public schools in the West University neighborhood of Houston. He received a B.S. degree from W. M. Rice University in 1953. He received a M.A. degree from Princeton University in 1955, a Ph.D.