Ralph Gordon Stanton

Ralph Stanton was born in Ontario, Canada, on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, and he died in St Boniface hospital in Winnipeg, at the age of 86. He preferred a simple life, content with a shelf of good books, his stamp collection, a little good food, congenial company, and an interesting problem on which to work. Stanton graduated with a PhD in Mathematics in 1949, and began his teaching career at the University of Toronto. He was one of the earliest staff members appointed in Mathematics at Waterloo, and he also served at York University (Canada) and at the University of Manitoba. During his illustrious, lengthy career he was a Professor, and several times Dean and Department Chairman or Head. Stanton's extremely distinguished academic career spanned 61 years. His distinctions include Killam Laureate, 1985, and honorary doctorates from four universities: D. Stanton commenced his research in group theory, in particular, with the Mathieu groups, in the late forties and early fifties. He then worked on families of difference sets and balanced incomplete block designs (BIBDs), from both combinatorial and statistical points of view. As well as BIBDs, he worked on covering and packing designs, constructions of Room squares, properties of various graphs, and of error-correcting codes. At the time of his death, he was still working on four classes of designs: Doehlert-Klee designs, small projective geometries described in combinato-rial terms, Sarvate-Beam triple systems and butterfly factorizations.