Libby Evans Medley ’69

Student

Dr. Coleman was one of my favorite professors. So pleased that he was able to continue teaching at HMC for a long period of time.

Jim Johnson ’71

Student

Perhaps my favorite professor at HMC. A dear person, great teacher and supportive mentor. Thanks Courtney.

Steven Spielman ’86

Former student

He was a superb educator. He was particularly good at figuring out what explanation would work for an individual student. If I was stuck on a homework problem, office hours was guaranteed to set me straight. The joke among my classmates was that sometimes the revelation would occur before actually reaching his office. “I went to ask Coleman, but I figured it out in the hallway. How does he do that?”

Francis Su

Colleague

One time I asked Court to sub for me in an advanced course I was teaching, and afterwards he gave me an impeccable set of notes on a topic I’d never covered before. I learned some cool stuff from those notes, and now that topic is one of my favorite things I like to cover in that course. That was Courtney–always generous, wise, kind, and a model teacher.

Darryl Yong ’96

Former student

When I heard of Courtney Coleman’s passing, I spent an afternoon looking at old notes from classes that I took with him. What came back was a flood of memories of how kind and gentle he was, while still being so effective at helping me advance my own understanding and fixing my misconceptions.

One funny memory was a time when we were in class and he had run out of English letter variable names, so he started using Greek letter variables (such as ξ and ζ, which are tricky to write). And then when he ran out of those he started using Russian (such as Ш and Щ, which were even harder to write). Hilarious mayhem ensued…

I am so grateful for his presence in the mathematics department while I was a student. I spent any hours in the office that he shared with Bob Borrelli and I feel his loss deeply.