Mark H. Ingraham was born on March 19, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York. He
received an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1922
and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1924. He was appointed a
Professor of Mathematics in 1927 and remained a member of the faculty
until his retirement in 1966.
Professor Ingraham published many mathematical papers on algebra and matrices between the 1920s and 1940s and had 17 PhD students. In the 1930s, he established on campus the first academic computing center in the United States. He was Chair of the Department of Mathematics from 1932 to 1942. Moreover, he served as Associate Secretary of the American Mathematical Society for 16 years and secured funds to support the Society's journal publications. He was president of the American Association of University Professors in 1938-39. From 1942 to 1961 Professor Ingraham served as Dean of the College of Letters and Science. When he stepped down as Dean in 1961, the esteem in which Mark Ingraham was held by the faculty is evident in the following faculty resolution:
It has been his peculiar genius as an administrator that he could both understand the distinctive needs and aims of the various types of specialists with whom he worked, and at the same time share with them his own broad vision of the larger whole university.
Mark Ingraham was a champion of intellectual freedom and liberal arts education. From 1961 until his retirement in 1966 he was the University’s Retirement Consultant. The University granted Professor Ingraham an honorary degree in 1973 in recognition of his post-retirement career in which he concentrated on the university’s retirement system; he wrote four books on retirement systems and a biography of Charles Sumner Slichter. a former colleague and Graduate Dean.
Ingraham Hall, named after Mark Ingraham, is adjacent to Van Vleck Hall.