By Carly Kempler and Christine Condon
Senior staff writers
Stan Fromovitz, a former University of Maryland professor, was found dead at the Indian Creek Trail on April 1, when students recovered his body during a community cleanup event. He was 80 years old.
Fromovitz started teaching at this university in September 1971 and retired in June 2001, said Katie Lawson, a university spokeswoman. He was a statistics and quantitative methods professor in the business school.
Born in Poland in 1936, Fromovitz and his mother were both Holocaust survivors. After the Holocaust, they relocated to Ontario, Canada.
Fromovitz grew up near Toronto and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1960. He later moved to California and earned his doctorate at Stanford University in statistics. Before teaching at this university, Fromovitz worked for the Shell Development Company in Emeryville, California, said Howard Weiner, Fromovitz’s friend and peer at Stanford. His work there was highly and widely regarded, Weiner added.
During his time with the company, Fromovitz and a colleague produced a data analysis tool called “Mangasarian-Fromovitz Constraint in Sequential Linear Programming.”
“He was absolutely brilliant,” said Robert Wilson, Fromovitz’s friend and a resident of the building he lived in. After teaching at Santa Clara University for two years, Fromovitz moved to the College Park area to teach at this university in 1971. He lived in the Towers in Westchester Park for more than 40 years, Wilson said.
Some described Fromovitz as a quiet man and an extremely generous individual.
“He would get up, get out the door, walk down the street [and] go to the 7-11,” said Maria Cordone, treasurer of the building’s board of directors. “He was a very, very generous person.”
Fromovitz was known to walk everywhere, including to the nearby McDonald’s on Greenbelt Road, as well as to this university, Cordone said.
“I still go out in the street, and I’m still looking for him — I keep on waiting to see him,” Cordone said. “It really hasn’t sunk in that he’s gone and that he’s passed. It’s just very sad.”
Fromovitz was known to visit the local McDonald’s often, Wilson said, especially in the mornings.
“He enjoyed eating out, mostly at McDonald’s,” Wilson chuckled. “His favorite place for breakfast was McDonald’s. I took him to the hospital for cataract surgery, and he hadn’t been able to eat before. He took me to McDonald’s for breakfast.”
Wilson added that, “When you got to know [Fromovitz], he had a good sense of humor. A lot of people didn’t see that.”
A spokesman for the Prince George’s County Police said investigators do not suspect foul play. Fromovitz’s cause of death has yet to be determined, according to the public information officer for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.
The building’s board of directors is arranging a service for Fromovitz at his former apartment building within the next two to three weeks, Cordone said. They are contacting local rabbis to conduct the service, as Fromovitz was Jewish.
The board will name the building’s third-floor library after Fromovitz and place a plaque there in his memory, Cordone said.
Fromovitz is survived by his two first cousins and two second cousins, all of whom live in Ontario.
A memorial service will be held in Fromovitz’s honor on Thursday, May 25 at 6 p.m. in the lobby of his former apartment building, the Westchester Towers. Everyone is invited, and the service will be lead by Rabbi Kenneth Cohen.
There was also a private burial for Fromovitz with a graveside service on May 2. He was buried in George Washington Cemetery within the Mount Lebanon section in Adelphi, Md.
