Nancy Swinski Deffeyes

Nancy Swinski Deffeyes, 86, of Princeton passed away on September 16, 2023, at Windsor Heathcare, Merwick in Plainsboro.

She was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1937. Nancy attended Holyoke High School, Class of 1955, and Smith College, Class of 1959. After college she moved to Houston, Texas, and worked at Shell Oil in the research library. At Shell Oil she met Kenneth Deffeyes, and they were married in 1962. Nancy and Kenneth lived briefly in St Paul, Minnesota, and Corvallis, Oregon, before settling in Princeton, New Jersey in 1967. Nancy worked as a Librarian at Westminster Choir College in Princeton until her retirement in 2018. In retirement she worked part-time at Orchard Farm Organics in Princeton.

Nancy loved the outdoors, gardening, mystery novels, fine art, and classical music.

Predeceased by her husband Kenneth Deffeyes, parents Walter and Lena (Dulkis) Swinski, and sister Kathryn Swinski.

Nancy is survived by a sister Joan (Swinski) Kaeble, son Stephen Deffeyes, daughter Sarah (Deffeyes) Domingo, nephew (godson) Christopher Kaeble, niece Gretchen (Kaeble) Hazlett, granddaughter Emma Domingo, and grandson Michael Domingo.

A gathering remembering Nancy will be held at Orchard Farm Organics at 1052 Cherry Hill Rd in Princeton, on Saturday October 14, at 2 p.m.

Nancy’s ashes are to be scattered in the Pardee Memorial Garden, Princeton Cemetery, and Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park.

Please consider making a donation in Nancy’s memory to Princeton Tigers Women’s Basketball.

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Joseph J. Kohn

Joseph J. Kohn, professor emeritus of mathematics at Princeton University, passed away peacefully on September 13, 2023, in Princeton. Joe was born in Prague, in the former Czechoslovakia, on May 18, 1932, the only child to architect Otto Kohn and Ema (Schwarz) Kohn. From early childhood it was clear that there was something special about Joe. His mother worried that he was too cerebral and often tried to get him outside and away from his books and figures.

In 1939, after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Joe and 20-odd members of his family left for Ecuador aboard the Orbita, leaving behind the world they knew. The family lived in Quito and then Cuenca. In Ecuador, as news from Europe darkened, Joe’s father, a successful architect in Prague, struggled to find the strength and means to rebuild his architectural practice. In 1945, Joe and his immediate family emigrated again, this time to New York City, where his father and mother set up a furniture design business and Joe attended Brooklyn Technical High School (’50). To encourage integration into American society, new immigrants at the time were encouraged to join the Boy Scouts. Joe joined up, and although never the sporting type, he managed to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout.   

Joe went on to study at MIT (’53) and then at Princeton University, where, under the tutelage of Donald Spencer, he earned his PhD in 1956. Joe then was a professor at Brandeis University for close to a decade before returning to Princeton in 1968 as tenured professor at Princeton University. He remained in the Princeton math department, serving three terms as Chair, until his retirement in 2008. Over the course of a long and distinguished career, he also was a visiting professor at many other universities, including Harvard University, the University of Mexico, the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Florence, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, and the Charles University in Prague. In 1990 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bologna.

Joe was a major figure in modern mathematical analysis, whose groundbreaking work on the interaction between partial differential equations and functions of several complex variables has dominated that area of mathematical research for over a half century. Joe was a devoted mentor to 16 PhD students at Princeton and at Brandeis and countless other graduate students and junior scholars.

Joe won the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1979 and the Balzano Medal from the Czechoslovak Mathematics and Physics Society in 1990, and the Stefan Bergman Prize in analysis from the American Mathematical Society in 2004. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966 and to the National Academy of Science in 1988. He served as editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and the Annals of Mathematics, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Mathematical Society and the Board of the Mathematical Sciences of the National Academy of Science.

In 1966 Joe married Anna Rosa Di Capua, of Quito, Ecuador. The Di Capua and the Kohn families had lived on the same street in Quito during the war and Joe’s first cousins (many of whom remained in Quito) arranged for the two to meet on one of Joe’s frequent visits to Ecuador.  It was evident to whomever met them that Joe and Anna Rosa shared a fundamental openness, kindness and a love for language, stories, food, art, music, and history. 

Joe was a devoted husband, father, and father-in-law (Lisa Stevenson), and nothing gave him more pleasure than to descend from his mathematical reveries on the third floor of their house on Sturges Way to tease, teach, and, most of all simply, to be near his three children — Eduardo, Emma, and Alicia. Years later he would do the same things with his two grandchildren, Benjamin and Milo. Together, the Kohn family liked to play chess, do puzzles, tell Jewish jokes and riddles, paint and — until the very end — to play Bananagrams. It’s no wonder that for over 50 years Joe and Anna Rosa’s Princeton home was a gathering place for mathematicians, family, friends, and anyone who liked good conversation about history, politics, or literature. 

Donations in memory of Joseph J. Kohn can be made to HIAS, the National Museum of Mathematics, and the Princeton Jewish Center.