Theodore A. Burton, age 89, passed into eternal life on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Port Angeles, Washington. He leaves his wife, Fredda Jean Burton, of Port Angeles; and his sisters: Hazel Kravchenko, of Port Angeles, Amy Courtney, of Chehalis, Washington, and Bess Todd, of Lacey, Washington.
Theodore Burton, “Ted” as he was affectionately called by his family, friends and colleagues, was born on a farm in Sedan, Kansas on Sept. 7, 1935. He was the fifth of seven children: Mary Kathryn, Farrel Jane, Elmer Lee, Amy Elizabeth, Theodore Allen, Bessie Marie and Hazel Nellie. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains in the 1930s forced his family to move to Idaho, then to the Sacramento area in California, and finally to Onalaska, Washington, a little town located near the Cascade Mountains region, where Ted graduated from elementary and high school. After serving in the Army for two years, he used education benefits from the GI Bill to matriculate at Washington State University (then known as Washington State College), where he graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree. His record at WSU earned him a full three-year fellowship to study advanced mathematics toward a Ph.D. degree. In addition to the fellowship, he won a national mathematics competition to help support his graduate studies. Ted defended his Ph.D. dissertation in mathematics in 1964.
Dr. Burton became a world-renowned mathematician, known as T. A. Burton in academia, who published over 215 research papers in mathematical journals devoted to research in the subjects of ordinary, integral, functional and fractional differential equations. He also authored five monographs (scholarly books) on these subjects and edited two books on mathematical biology. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited over 9,000 times by other leading authors and researchers, which does not include the citations he had already received before the advent of the Internet. Dr. Burton was a co-founder of the Electronic Journal of Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, an internationally well-known and highly respected online journal. Furthermore, he served either as an editor-in-chief or an associate editor of several other major mathematical journals.
Professor Burton joined the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIU-C) mathematics department in 1966, from which he retired and was conferred the rank of Professor Emeritus in 1998. One of his first teaching positions was at a WSU Tri-Cities campus in Pasco, Washington, where he met and married Fredda Jean Anderson in 1961. Ted also taught at the University of Alberta after receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1964 and as a visiting professor for one semester at the University of Memphis in 2009. He had the reputation of being a wonderful teacher and in 1985 received the AMOCO award for outstanding university teacher at SIU-C. Ted was a Fulbright senior scholar at both the University of Szeged and the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary and held brief research appointments at the University of Florence and the University of Madrid. Throughout his tenure as a mathematics professor and even after his retirement, he was invited to give keynote talks and plenary lectures at conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Ted always believed that his main achievement in academia was the guidance and counsel that he gave to his 13 doctoral students at SIU-C, as attested by their lifelong heartfelt affection for him and all of whom like him ended up being university professors and researchers.
There is no funeral planned at this time.
