Claudia Alison Spiro

Claudia Alison Spiro, loving mother, daughter, sister and friend, passed away January 4, 2023 after a brief battle with cancer. She was 66 years old. She was preceded in death by her mother, father, and one brother.

The daughter of Robert Spiro and Lorraine Shatz, Claudia spent her childhood in Altadena, where she delighted in the Rose Parade and made many neighborhood friends. She loved music and learned clarinet and piano, and she liked a good game of chess. In Altadena, she served as big sister to two siblings, Andrew and Mary. Robert's second marriage to Constance Mobley brought three more siblings, Douglas, Anne-Constance, and Nicholas (deceased), into her life.

Born March 4, 1956, Claudia could not help but become a mathematician: her birthday was 3-4-56. Claudia reportedly showed great love of numbers before the age of five, when she would ask for three-digit multiplication problems and calculate them in her head.

As a young adult, Claudia pursued higher education at Caltech, where she completed both her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mathematics by the age of twenty-one. Within four more years, she had finished a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Numbers Theory. Her dissertation title was, "The Frequency with Which an Integral-Valued, Prime-Independent, Multiplicative or Additive Function of n Divides a Polynomial Function of n." In addition to publications in her own right, she is known in the field of mathematics as having an "Erdos Number of 1" for collaborating and publishing with noted mathematician Paul Erdos.

During her career, Claudia studied and taught mathematics at both the college and high school levels, and enjoyed helping her students apply mathematics to real world problems. In later years, she acquired new skills in programming and data science. On her resume, she highlighted her ability to "partner with Analysts, Software Engineers, Mathematicians, Economists, and other Data Scientists to uncover new and innovative ways to locate anomalies in massive data sets."

Claudia had great love and pride for her three children, from her marriage to Robert Silverman--Joel, Sarah, and Isaac (formerly Michael). Throughout her life, Claudia also developed and strengthened her bond with God. She was active in her church, led regular Bible study groups, and traveled on missions.

Friends and family alike remember Claudia particularly for her humor and intelligence, for the bedrock of faith that served as her foundation, and for her compassion, kindness and tremendous courage.