Obituary of William H. Ittleson

William H. (Bill) Ittelson (1920-2017) passed away peacefully on September 20 with his family at his side. He was preceded in death by his wife of 52 years, Martha, in 1998. He is survived by son Lane and daughter-in-law Ellen of Denver, Colorado, and granddaughter Margaret of Phoenix. Born to Ralph and Julia Ittelson on May 4, 1920, in New York, Bill attended elementary and high school in Mount Vernon, New York. Bill graduated from Columbia in 1942 with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. He joined the air-borne Navy during WWII, where he worked at the Naval Research Laboratory on the early development and perfection of radar and was later dispatched to the South Pacific for installation and training on the new radar systems. It was near the close of the War when Bill met artist and occupational therapist Martha Lane, originally from Santa Fe New Mexico, who was using her skills in occupational therapy to retrain wounded soldiers in Modesto, California at the time. They married in 1946, with Martha continuing her career in occupational therapy for another ten years after which she devoted herself to her increasingly successful career as a fine artist. After marriage, Bill entered Princeton where he obtained a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering. He then switched his major and completed a PhD in Psychology. Bill taught at Princeton for five years before moving to the faculty of The City University of New York (CUNY) from 1955-1975, first teaching at Brooklyn College and then at the Graduate Center. Bill's last academic stop was the University of Arizona. He joined the faculty in 1975 and, although he officially retired in 1997, he continued to teach the course on History of Psychology because, as he said, he was so old that he was actually there when it happened. His sense of humor was but one of the many things students and colleagues will miss. He was a kind and supportive colleague, and a devoted mentor ˗˗ not only to his students, but also to junior faculty, who remember him with great fondness and respect. Bill's long and influential career spanned many of the traditional boundaries within Psychology. Regarded by many as the founder of the field of Environmental Psychology, much of his work focused on how our environment influences cognition and behavior. The scope of his work was broad and interdisciplinary, ranging from topics in visual perception to a classic study of how the spatial and architectural environment of psychiatric wards could be detrimental to the expression of symptoms in psychotic patients. Bill continued to publish long after his formal retirement from academia, including a compilation of essays published in September 2017 as an e-book: Thoughts about Thinking. In this book, he challenges us to see beneath the surface, to see beyond the perspectives we take for granted, and consider big-picture questions about how it is that humans and other organisms perceive the world, how they create mental representations of that world, and how they share those representations with others. Bill never tired of trying to understand the mystery of the human mind, and in his quest to understand how humans acquire and represent knowledge, he was never shy to question the knowledge we often take for granted. He did so with an incisive intellect, but also with a deep humility, a wry sense of humor, and profound respect for science and for the scientists he would question. There will be a gathering of friends, family and colleagues to celebrate Bill's life, likely in December, and definitely in Tucson. Memorial contributions to Casa de la Luz Hospice, 7740 North Oracle Road, Tucson, AZ 85704.