Joseph A. Schatz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1924. He was the third of four children of Gertrude and Henry Schatz, who ran a candy store and post office. He was a good student in the Philadelphia school system with a lively social life.
After high school, he served in the Signal Corps before being drafted into the army for World War II. The army sent him to learn engineering at Virginia Tech, so he could work on the atomic bomb project at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. After the War, he returned to Virginia Tech on the GI Bill for a BS in engineering. After graduation in 1948, he married Phyllis Atchick. He went to graduate school in mathematics at Brown University, where he earned a PhD in 1952, with a dissertation on C-star algebras.
Dr. Schatz was an assistant professor in mathematics at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, then a faculty at University of Connecticut in Storrs. In 1957, he received an offer from Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he spent 15 years as an applied mathematician. He solved a wide variety of engineering problems, ranging from inertial stability of space platforms to language parsing of scientific papers. He was known for his research on citation indices (Super-classics of mathematics) and on mathematical logic (The nature of truth). He was the last resort for the hardest problems and is reputed to have never failed to solve a problem he agreed to take on.
As the national labs transformed, he moved back to academia in 1972 and became an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Houston. He worked there for 25 years until his retirement in 1988, when he became an Emeritus. He was noted for his teaching of mid-life undergraduates, helping them overcome their fear of mathematics. His broad research included the psychology of infant cognition. After his retirement, he lived quietly in Houston with his books and his notes. He moved briefly to Minnesota to be close to his children just before his death on August 10, 2007.
Joseph Arthur Schatz is survived by his children Bruce Schatz, Rebecca Schatz, Steven Schatz and Susan Hawkins; by the mother of his children Phyllis Schatz; by his siblings Bertram Schatz and Rita Rosen; by his grandchildren Serena Schatz, Jacob Singer, Karl Singer, and Lauren Hawkins; and by his special friend Sydney Greenblatt. He helped many people find their own way and will be much missed by all.
Contributions in his honor may be sent to: the Joseph Schatz Scholarship for Nontraditional Mathematics Student c/o College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Houston, 214 Science & Research Bldg 1, Houston, TX 77204-5008.