Dick Gross (1950-2025)

O. Knill , December 25, 2025

It had been sad to hear in December that Benedict Gross passed away. The news had already circulated on December 21 but it is now official. Apropos: there is also an older faculty spotlight.

Dick Gross was the chairman of the department when I came here. He had started the preceptor program and Daniel Goroff was the first who led it. That program has launched in 1999. (The 1999-2000 team had already been led by Daniel Goroff. It consisted of Robin Gottlieb, John Boller, Tamara Lefcourt, Andy Engelward and Robert Winters as preceptors. Tamara Lefcourt then left in 2000 and John Mackey, Dale Winter and me joined in 2000. The program has expanded much since. Robin Gottlieb led it from 2007-2022 and Brendan Kelly since 2022.)

From 1999-2002 Dick was the department head. He had put me also in charge of the department website. (I served in the role of maintaining the page for 20 years from 2000 to 2020). In 2002, Dick Gross had been the Dean of undergraduate Education (I worked with him then also to to built them a website in 2002, a time when we still connected to the web via telephone modems; when every line of the website was hand written and where photos like this were done with a camera that stored photos on floppy disks!) Gross was named Dean of Harvard College , which was merged with the office of the dean of undergraduate education in April 2003. Gross served in this role until 2007. He taught his last class here in 2015 and moved in 2016 to San Diego. His last class in algebra must have been legendary. I know that many students just took that class because they knew it was a last opportunity to see a legend teaching and to witness the end of an era.

Added January 21, 2026: The current dean of Harvard college, David Deming wrote in an email to the university: "During his undergraduate years he lived in both Adams and Currier, making him among the first cohort of men to move to the Quad when Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges integrated housing. He would go on to earn a Marshall Scholarship and a PhD from the Mathematics Department in 1978. He joined the faculty in 1985 and served faithfully in many administrative roles including Chair of the Math Department, Dean of Undergraduate Education, and eventually Dean of the College. Professor Gross welcomed students into the world of Mathematics. For many years he taught a quantitative reasoning course called "The Magic of Numbers". He credited Math 55 with both challenging him and setting his career trajectory that included sharing the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1987. While he taught his last class at Harvard in 2015, his many contributions were recognized in August 2025 with the establishment of the Benedict H. Gross Distinguished Visitors Program by the Math Department. As Dean of Harvard College, Professor Gross led a review of the undergraduate curriculum and focused on developing concentrations, tutoring, the first-year seminar program, study abroad, and undergraduate research. Much of that work, and the efforts he led as Dean of Undergraduate Education from 2002-2003, built the modern undergraduate experience.