He was born in New York City on January 10, 1923 and died June 2, 1979 in Houston. He attended Trinity College from 1939 to 1941. From the University of Texas in Austin, he received his B.A. degree with highest honors in 1948 and his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics in 1951 under the supervision of Professor H. S. Wall. He had worked as a Vibration Analyst at United Aircraft Corporation in East Hartford, Connecticut from 1941 to 1943, and had served in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946. He taught at Northwestern University (1951-52), the University of North Carolina (1952-67), and the University of Houston (1967-79).
Professor Mac Nerney was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematics Association of America, the North Carolina Academy of Sciences, the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society, Circolo Matematico di Palermo, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. He was president of the North Carolina chapter of Sigma Xi, 1966-67. He was listed in American Men of Science and Who's Who in the South and Southwest from which much of the above data was obtained.
John Mac Nerney was a mathematician, a teacher, and a friend. I have the highest regard for him in all three categories. His mathematical interests were different from mine, so I shall leave as an exercise for the reader to outline the highlights of his contributions to Mathematical Analysis.
I was Mac's colleague at the University of North Carolina during the academic year 1964-65, and again at the University of Houston from 1967 until his death. Most of the happy memories I have from the year in Chapel Hill are of the friendship of me and my wife, Kathie, and Mac and his wife, the lovely Kathleen Mary O'Connor Mac Nerney, whom he married December 8, 1945.
It was Mac and Kathleen who helped us find and move into a house in Chapel Hill. I remember Kathleen scrubbing the bathroom of that house from floor to ceiling. They lined up a pediatrician for our daughter, Virginia, and an obstetrician at the University Hospital for Kathie. When our second daughter, Carolyn, was born in November, the only visitors the mother and baby were allowed were the father and two sets of grandparents. We listed Mac and Kathleen as one of those sets.
Once, while we were in North Carolina, Kathie's father sent us a case of Ranch Style beans - a Texas delight not obtainable in Chapel Hill - which we shared with the Mac Nerneys. When Kathie and our children preceded me home from an 18 month stay in Australia in 1973, Mac and Kathleen welcomed them at the Houston Airport with a one gallon can of Ranch Style beans.
As a colleague at Chapel Hill, Mac was the man who stumbled over the ropes with me. Mac's comment when I proved a theorem and then found that Burton Jones had already done it was that I was lucky. After all, he pointed out, I had proved a good theorem; I knew that as fine a mathematician as Burton Jones was interested in it; and I didn't have to write it up for publication. One evening I devised what I thought was an exceedingly clever argument which seemed to prove something I wanted to know. My elation, however, turned first to deflation, when I noticed that if the argument were correct, it would also settle the continuum hypothesis, and then to frustration, when I could not find the error that I knew had to be there. The next afternoon, Mac consented to listen to my argument, which he did until I reached a point at which I found an error. And then we traded places for me to hear the argument he had worked out the night before. As I recall, that one was a proof.
One of the stories Mac liked to tell was of a time when, as a graduate student at Texas, he was in his office thinking about a problem. His friend Pat Porcelli came into his office and sat in a chair. After a couple of hours of complete silence, Pat stood up, commented that it had been a very productive afternoon, and left.
It is easy to paint a portrait of a man as a character. It is hard to paint a portrait of a man of character. John Sheridan Mac Nerney was a good man.