David Zitarelli

1941 - 2018

The day of December 2 was perfectly normal for David Zitarelli. He jogged four miles, which brought his 2018 total to 1,110 miles and his lifetime total to 57,366 miles. (We know this because he tracked his mileage daily, beginning in 1973.) He wrote in his journal (the “Z Notes”), the same one he has been keeping daily since 1977, first on yellow notepads, then on a series of ever-more-complex word processors. He ate a rotisserie chicken for dinner with his wife, spent time babysitting his two Minneapolis grandkids, then FaceTimed with his two Seattle grandkids. He read a few pages of his Jill Lepore book, slipped his bookmark into page 422, and went to sleep. And then he died. His heart, whose genetic insufficiencies he had tried like hell to mitigate over many years via near-daily exercise, finally gave out. It was a heart that many of us knew – family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, baristas, dental hygienists – because he wore it proudly on his sleeve. For better or worse (mostly better), all of us knew where we stood with Dr. Z, a gentile mensch if ever there was one. He was born on August 12, 1941 in Chester, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Holmes, PA. He was a proud graduate of Ridley High School (Class of 1959), then went on to earn his Bachelor’s (1963) and Master’s (1965) Degrees at Temple University, followed by a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Penn State. The same year he secured his Ph.D. (1970), he began a teaching career at Temple that would span 42 years before his retirement as a Full Professor in 2012. During that tenure, he was awarded multiple teaching honors – most notably a Great Teacher Award in 2005 – but was perhaps most proud of the legions of students that he inspired, persuaded, and cajoled into mathematics-related careers. His love of teaching combined with his love of sports in another important aspect of his life – softball coaching – where he nurtured and inspired legions of young women (including his daughter) to strive for athletic excellence. Zitarelli loved words as much as he loved numbers. Beginning in 1984, he enjoyed a fruitful, decade-long collaboration with Dr. Raymond Coughlin, authoring five successful mathematics textbooks. He went on to write two more textbooks (one alone; one with Dr. David Hill) before turning his attention to his late-career passion: the history of mathematics. In 2001 he published EPADEL: A Semisesquicentennial History, 1926-2000, which charts the history of the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware Section of the Mathematical Association of America, and then in 2004 turned to the larger work that would dominate the last fifteen years of his life: A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada. He completed Volume 1, covering the years 1492-1930, in 2018, and it will be published in 2019 by MAA Press, an imprint of the American Mathematical Society. He was hard at work on Volume 2 (1930-2000) at the time of his death, and may well have finished it sooner had it not been for the welcome distractions of four grandchildren, all of whom arrived between 2009 and 2016. He and his wife Anita (whom he married in 1966 and fiercely loved for all of their 52 years of marriage) split their retirement time between stints in Minneapolis (with daughter Nicole Danielsen, son-in-law Ryan Danielsen, and grandchildren Oliver and Zoey) and Bainbridge Island, WA (with son Paul Zitarelli, daughter-in-law Kelli Larsen, and grandchildren Lenna and Solomon). Despite initial sadness about leaving his “Philly roots,” Zitarelli flourished in the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, making easy friends in both places and cherishing the chance to participate in the daily lives of his children and grandchildren. Was Zitarelli perfect? Of course not. He was known to teach swear words to young children. He could exaggerate (he would doubtless revise this to “embellish”) the truth of a matter in the pursuit of “a good story.” Sometimes if he was losing in a game of one-on-one basketball, he would knee his own family member in the back of the leg to secure a rebound and then flatly deny a foul. No, he was not perfect. But he was very very good, and he was ours for a time, and we loved him. The family will be holding private services. In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to the American Heart Association or other charities.