Deceased May 27, 2022

View alumni profile (log in required)
Read obituary

In Memory

Brilliant. Gentle. Kind. Friends, colleagues and students offered these words about Mark Peterson, who taught physics and mathematics at Mount Holyoke for almost four decades. They treasured his joy in teaching—how he would come out of class with a smile on his face and was constantly thinking of new ways to work with students; how he was willing to say, “I don’t know,” and then work to find out, to keep learning and discovering. Younger colleagues considered him a mentor who helped them be better teachers.

His was an extraordinary mind, full of curiosity, with an enormous breadth of interests and astonishing facility in science, languages, literature and music. Much of Mark’s scholarship was interdisciplinary, exploring the underpinnings of the Western scientific tradition, especially as expressed in the life and thought of Galileo. His wonderful and very readable book Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts was a key accomplishment.

Mark had an easy sense of humor. He was a good singer who loved Renaissance and Baroque music and an avid swimmer, doing 40 laps daily in the pool until a few months before his death. At age 67, he took up open-water swimming—in the Virgin Islands, the Hudson River and the seas around Greece, Croatia and Sardinia. He was a fan of good coffee, good beer and good ice cream.

Mark approached his brain cancer diagnosis with equanimity. He had lived a good life and had a close-knit, loving family. He looked forward to the arrival of a grandchild last summer, but his daughter, Maya, and her baby died in childbirth. The shock and sorrow of this unexpected tragedy brought profound sadness to his final months. He died peacefully at home on May 27 with his loving wife, Indira, at his side.

Jon Solins ’68

Comment:

Stevens R. Miller '80: Dr. Peterson was one of my first teachers at Amherst. None ever surpassed him in his patience, empathy, or ability to create understanding. He also had a quiet wit that created a moment I will never forget.

After literally every other member of the physics department had declined to do so, I walked into Mark Peterson's office in 1979 and said, "Professor Peterson, you are my last chance. No one else will do a thesis with me. Will you?" He said, "Of course I will, but I get to pick the topic." It was a deal.

The topic he picked involved scattering laser light off microscopic glass tubes. Making the tubes was hard. Before our first success, I wrote computer programs that predicted the scattering pattern. At a mid-thesis presentation, most of the physics faculty looked at them rather skeptically, as those predictions showed highly erratic blobs of light, encircling the tube.

Towards the end of spring 1980, we finally made a microscopic glass tube. Dr. Peterson watched over me as, ever so gently, I mounted the tube in a stand where the laser could light it up. We dimmed the room, switched on the beam and saw, all around on the walls, highly erratic blobs of light, encircling the tube.

I will always remember, in the darkness next to me, my advisor, Mark Peterson, saying, "Well. This ought to silence those doubters."

He was the kind of person who found a reason to have faith in you, when no one else could. I teach at a university myself, these days. With every student I meet, I try to do for them what Mark Peterson did for me: find something to have faith in. Thanks for teaching me that lesson, Doc.