Morton E. Gurtin ’61 PhD, of Pittsburgh, Apr. 20, following a long illness. He was world-renowned in the fields of nonlinear continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, lecturing throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Japan. Though he rarely attended class or studied in college, preferring instead to race cars, play sports, and cavort with his fraternity brothers, his natural facility for mathematics and science allowed him to receive the highest grade on his physics final; however, his professor gave him a failing grade because he never attended class. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he worked as a structural engineer at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles and General Electric in Utica, N.Y., where he excelled and wrote his first academic papers. In 1959, he went back to school to nurture his passion for research and received a National Defense Fellow scholarship to attend the PhD program in applied mathematics at Brown. After completing his PhD, he was awarded a research associateship at Brown and quickly became an assistant professor and then a tenured associate professor. In 1966, he joined the mathematics department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a full professor and was later honored with an endowed chair under the title of Alumni Professor of Mathematics. His list of academic honors is extensive, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a senior Fulbright-Hays research fellowship (1974), and an honorary fellowship at the University of Wisconsin’s Mathematics Research Center (1981-1982). He was Ordway Professor (1990) at the University of Minnesota and won Carnegie Mellon’s Richard Moore Education Award (1999), the Agostinelli Prize (2001) from the Academia Nationale dei Lincei, Italy, and the Timoshenko Medal for distinguished contributions in applied mechanics (2004). He also established the Center for Nonlinear Analysis at CMU and was a founding member of the Society of Natural Philosophy. Outside of academia, he was a fierce competitor and poet and had a deep love for sports, especially the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was a competitive sailor, racing in Narragansett during his years at Brown. He was also a rock climber, scaling the Cinque Torri in Cortina, and a competitive road racer and track runner, completing the Boston Marathon in under three hours at age 47 and earning fifth place in the 50-55 age group at the Masters Track and Field Championships at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. He is survived by a daughter and son-in-law; a daughter-in-law and son Bill ’82; and three grandchildren, including Grant Gurtin ’13.