BOWLING GREEN — W. Charles Holland, renowned in his mathematical specialty and a Bowling Green State University distinguished research professor emeritus, who brought care leavened with humor, maybe a tune, to the academic realm, died July 30 in Atria senior community, Longmont, Colo. He was 85.
He had dementia, his daughter, Claudia Behnke, said. He and his wife, Claudia Holland, moved from Bowling Green to Colorado — Boulder, then Longmont. He returned to BGSU in 2009 for the annual International Conference on Ordered Algebraic Structures, during which he was honored.
He was a former chairman of the BGSU department of mathematics and statistics. He also sang bass in the Logarhythms, which he helped found. The barbershop-style quartet often performed comic songs on math themes — for instance, “3.14159...” the initial digits of pi, set to the tune of “Sweet Adeline.”
“He came up with some clever ideas,” said Tom O’Brien, a BGSU math professor emeritus. “He was a multi-talented guy. He was a fine mathematician. He was a musician. He was an excellent teacher. He was good at everything he did.”
Mr. Holland retired from BGSU at the end of 2002. In 1993, university trustees named Mr. Holland a distinguished research professor, an honor for those with academic accomplishment of wide acclaim.
He was recognized as a world leader in an area of algebra known as ordered groups, and his renown made the university a draw for researchers in that field.
“There’s a real, real beauty to the subject,” Mr. Holland told The Blade in 2002. Yet he laughed a bit when asked exactly what he did.
“The field is so technical that it’s really, really difficult to explain what we do to nonexperts,” Mr. Holland said in 2002. “Nothing that I do is applied...I’m not here to build a better refrigerator.”
By the early 1990s, half the researchers in his field were his students or former students.
Rick Ball, a graduate student of his in the late 1960s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Blade in 2002 that Mr. Holland was known to pull a rubber chicken out of his lunch sack or start class by writing recipes on the board.
On Saturday, Mr. Ball, now a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Denver, said: “He was an inspiration. He was the reason I became a mathematician.”
Mr. Ball recalled the competitive environment.
“Everyone around you is infinitely smart, and you’re not sure you are,” Mr. Ball said.
And he recalled Mr. Holland: “Utterly brilliant. Someone one admired profoundly and a tremendously nice man. It was easy to become friends with him.”
In the long strings of emailed remembrances Mr. Ball has received, “What comes through was the warmth of this man’s personality and his ability to connect on a personal level,” he said.
Mr. Holland had studied in West Germany on a NATO scholarship and taught at the University of Chicago. He was in Madison when he was recruited to BGSU to help begin the doctoral program in mathematics.
“It was a coup for us,” Mr. O’Brien said.
In Bowling Green, Mr. Holland performed with the Black Swamp Players, including Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and Ruddigore. He took part in racquet sports and played the piano. Earlier, he’d played trombone and built a harpsichord and a clavichord.
Wilbur Charles Holland, Jr., was born Feb. 24, 1935, in Parkersburg, W.Va., to Ada and Wilbur Charles Holland. His father was an oil company geologist and the family lived in Wyoming. The family moved to Louisiana and the next year, 1953, Mr. Holland graduated from Natchitoches High School. He started as a physics major at Tulane University before switching to math. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Tulane in 1961.
“I somehow was comforted with the axiomatic approach to things, when you lay down the rules and build up from there,” Mr. Holland told The Blade in 2002.
His daughter Rebecca Wilder Holland died in 1990.
Surviving are his wife, the former Claudia Octavia Brown, whom he married June 1, 1955; sons Eric, Paul, and Dave Holland; daughter, Claudia Behnke; eight grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.
A memorial service will be held later.