We regret to report the passing of Professor Emeritus Maurice Heins, who at one time held a distionguished professorship in complex analysis in our department. Maurice Heins received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1940. He was a highly prolific scholar and enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia. His research interests were varied but focused primarily on complex and harmonic analysis. He was the author of close to 100 research papers, published in the most prestigious journals, and three textbooks on complex analysis. He is especially known for his work on Hardy classes of functions defined on Riemann surfaces and on conformal metrics.
Professor Heins held academic positions at three major research universities: Brown University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Maryland, where he was recruited to a distinguished chair professorship. He was invited to visiting positions and to give lectures at the major mathematics research centers in the United States and Europe, including the University of California Berkeley, Imperial College, London and the University of Paris.
Known for his kind and gentle demeanor, Professor Heins was widely sought as a mentor and advisor. He was the thesis advisor for some nineteen students over the course of his career. Although he retired from his professorship at the University of Maryland, he continued to pursue his research interests, publishing papers into the 1990s. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also the American Mathematical Society.