Marilyn Malka Levine

Levine, Marilyn Malka (Nee Gordon) Was born April 11, 1933, in Brooklyn, NY. She attended public schools in Queens. In 1953, she met her husband-to-be Leonard "Len" Levine at a required dance class, and in 1954 became one of the very few women who graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York with a degree in Mathematics. The couple moved to Milwaukee in 1967, when Leonard Levine joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UW-Milwaukee. Marilyn turned entrepreneur in 1965, with The Look-it-up Lady. In those pre-computer days, she offered manual data searches. She received her Doctorate from UWM's School of Education in 1982. Her thesis compared Claude Shannon's theories of linguistics in child development, to the actual progress of a growing child. A few years later, Marilyn changed her company name to Doctor Levine's Information Machine and began to provide Boolean searches of publicly accessible databases, using a terminal and a dial-up line. Dr. Levine strongly believed librarians should be innovators both in indexing data and in data searching. In her classes at UWM's School of Engineering Extension, she taught many librarians to perform Boolean searches. In 1981, she changed her company name to Information Express, and authored several papers, some co-authored with her husband Prof. Len Levine. Topics included the information business, programming without mathematics, and quantifying information impact with a unit she created and called Whomps. In 1987, she gathered 26 information professionals in Milwaukee to form AIIP (the Association of Independent Information Professionals), and was voted AIIP's first President. The organization now has more than 500 members worldwide. In 1992 Dr. Levine co-authored A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America with Shauna Singh Baldwin, a book that sold 10,000 copies in English and is also available in Chinese. Marilyn spoke about pantheism on Milwaukee Public Television and to the Milwaukee Business and Professional Women's Club on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Women's Bible. She also wrote about the ethics of robots and used Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge in teaching communication theory. Her phonemic keyboard received a patent and her play about the Last Days of Spinoza was presented in playreading by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Dr. Levine sold brand name rights to Information Express and turned to art in 1993. At Bay View Gallery she showcased and promoted several local artists such as Bruce Pattison and Carl Ruppert until her retirement in 2000. Dr. Marilyn Levine passed away on Sat., June 5, 2010. "She was diagnosed with bladder cancer and decided that she did not want any kind of treatment for it." says her son David D. Levine on his blog, "...Mom was never the type to let anyone else tell her what to do. She died as she lived, on her own terms." A celebration of Dr. Marilyn Levine's life will take place on Thursday, June 10, at 11:00AM, AT THE FUNERAL HOME. GOODMAN BENSMAN Whitefish Bay Funeral Home 4750 N. Santa Monica 414-964-3111 www.goodmanbensman.com