Well before schoolchildren had access to smartphones, iPads and personal computers, Patrick Colonel Suppes was using his knowledge as a philosopher and a scientist to bring interactive computer-assisted learning into the classroom. Suppes was the former director of Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), the Lucie Stern Professor Emeritus and a recipient of the National Medal of Science, awarded by President George H.W. Bush in 1990.
Suppes died at his home on the Stanford campus on November 17 after a short battle with cancer. He was 92.
After studying at the University of Oklahoma, Suppes transferred to the University of Chicago, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in meteorology in 1943. He served in the Army Reserve as a meteorologist in the Pacific and then completed a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. He joined Stanford’s department of philosophy in 1950, teaching and writing extensively in both philosophy and the social sciences.
In 1967, Suppes founded the Computer Curriculum Corporation, a pioneer in the computerized learning movement. His research in set theory led to programs based on his series of elementary school math textbooks, Sets and Numbers. Suppes served as director of Stanford’s Institute for Mathematical Research in the Social Sciences from 1959 to 1992 and director of EPGY from 1992 to 2010. During his 64 years at Stanford, he published 34 books and hundreds of articles and taught as recently as last spring. In 2002, he published Representation and Invariance in Scientific Structures, a book that was said to represent the culmination of his work.
Suppes was honored at a conference marking his 90th birthday in 2012, when leading scholars from various scientific and philosophical fields contributed papers collected for a forthcoming book entitled Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience: Essays Inspired by Patrick Suppes.
Suppes’s daughter, Alexandra, ’02, MA ’04, a research scientist at Columbia University, said she was steeped in academia from a young age. “My dad was so interested in others that we were constantly exposed to different types of people, traveled and allowed to sit in on his lectures and seminars. He loved to help my friends who were just starting out in their careers; he hired several to work at EPGY.”
Besides Alexandra, Suppes is survived by his wife, Michelle Nguyen; children, Patricia, Deborah, John and Michael; three stepchildren; and five grandchildren.
Julie Muller Mitchell, '79, is a writer in San Francisco.
