Biography
I grew up 400 miles north of Evanston in the picturesque Copper Country of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where, in 1913, 73 people (59 were children) died in a Christmas Eve Disaster reportedly because someone caused panic at a party for families of striking miners. After that, no union organizer dared enter the area until my parents, Gene and Martha Saari, did so shortly after my birth in 1940. Their successful leadership, with union strategy meetings held in our home, ensured an exciting, occasionally dangerous, time as a youth.
After graduating from high school, college options were an Ivy and a local engineering school. Without money, Michigan Tech, two miles away, was my only real choice: expenses were covered with scholarships, summer work on the ore boats and in a copper smelter along with being a (mediocre) ski instructor, and teaching freshman mathematics during my senior year. As junior class president, I protested the State’s cut to Tech’s budget by creating “Operation Bloodletting” where students would “sell our blood to keep the university afloat.” Outrageous? Admittedly! But the publicity, across the US and even Europe, proved to be successful.
A highlight of Purdue graduate school was marrying Lillian Kalinen, a lovely Finnish-American from Vermont; we enjoyed 53 wonderful years until she died in 2019. My Post-Doc was in the Yale Astronomy Dept. (near Vermont). The next 32 delightful years were at NU, with research emphasizing dynamics, evolution of the universe, voting/decision theory, and mathematical economics, plus activities such as chairing GFC, the math department, and several university committees including athletics, and leaving as the inaugural Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. (Art Pancoe and I remain friends talking about NU football.)
Believing I should change universities every century, in 2000 we moved to sunny, warm UC-Irvine where I directed the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences until retiring in 2017. For standard “recognition comments,” I probably chaired too many national and international boards, an elected member of the NAS, fellow of both AAAS’s, foreign member of the Finnish “Academy of Science and Letters” and of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), with honorary PhDs from two US universities, University of Caen (France), University of Turku (Finland), and the RAS. In a “Saari” recognition of my research, the IAU named asteroid 9177 “Donsaari.”