Ron Larson

Education

From 1959 until 1962, Ron and Deanna Larson started and operated a small business, called Larson's Custom Quilting. In 1962, they sold the business and Ron began attending Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. In 1964, he obtained his associate degree from Clark. Upon graduation from Clark College, Larson was awarded a scholarship from the Alcoa Foundation, which he used to attend Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He graduated, with honors, from Lewis & Clark in 1966. During the four years from 1962 through 1966, Ron worked full-time, first at a restaurant and then at a grocery store, in Vancouver and Deanna worked full-time as the secretary to the president of Roberts Motor Company in Portland, Oregon.

From 1966 to 1970, Larson attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his master's degree in 1968 and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1970. While at the University of Colorado, Larson was the recipient of an NDEA scholarship and an NSF fellowship. He also served as a teaching assistant. His Ph.D. dissertation "On the Lattice of Topologies" was written under Wolfgang J. Thron. Larson's Ph.D. lineage, as listed by the North Dakota State University, traces back through George David Birkhoff, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the co-developer of calculus.

Academic career

In 1970, Larson accepted a position of assistant professor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College in Erie, Pennsylvania. At the time, Behrend College was a 2-year branch campus of the university. In 1971, the Board of Trustees of the university met with the Behrend Advisory Board to announce Behrend College would become the first location outside University Park with the authority to develop baccalaureate program and confer degrees locally. During his first several years at the college, Larson was instrumental in developing a mathematics major at the college. He served as a member of the University Faculty Senate and also as Behrend College's representative on the University Faculty Council. Larson was promoted to associate professor in 1976 and professor in 1983.

Early in his career at Penn State, Larson started writing manuscripts for textbooks. He completed and submitted three manuscripts for calculus texts in 1973, 1974, and 1975, only to be rejected by several publishers. Larson relates his determination to continue writing in an essay titled A Single Dream. "When Marilyn Monroe was asked if she had been lucky in her career, she said 'When you have a single dream it is more than likely to come true---because you keep working toward it without getting mixed up.' Anyone who has been in my office knows that I am a Marilyn fan. But not just a Marilyn fan---I am a fan of the American Dream." Finally, in 1976 he and his co-author, Robert P. Hostetler, obtained a contract from D. C. Heath and Company. The first edition of their calculus book was published in December, 1978. In 1995, Hostetler left the authorship team and was replaced by Bruce A. Edwards of the University of Florida. Calculus by Larson and Edwards is now in its eleventh edition. It is used worldwide and has been translated in several languages.

During the academic year of 1983–84, Larson served as the acting division head for the Division of Science at Penn State Erie.

In 1998 Larson was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon.

Ron Larson was born in Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Washington, the second of four children of Mederith John Larson and Harriet Eleanor Larson. Mederith Larson was an officer in the 321st Engineer Battalion of the United States Army. Mederith Larson served in active duty during World War II, where he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart, and the Korean War, where he was awarded an Oak Leaf Cluster and a Silver Star. During the years that Ron was growing up, his father was stationed in several military bases, including Chitose, Hokkaido, Japan and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. While in Chitose, Ron attended a small DoDDS school, where he was one of only three students in the sixth grade. When Mederith Larson retired from the Army in 1957, he moved with his family to Vancouver, Washington, where he lived until he died (at the age of 89) in 2005. Harriet Larson died (at the age of 95) in the fall of 2009.

Larson spent his first two years of high school at Leilehua High School in Wahiawa, Hawaii. In 1957, when his family moved to Vancouver, Washington, Larson enrolled in Battle Ground High School, where he graduated in 1959. On October 29, 1960, at the age of 18, he married Deanna Sue Gilbert, also of Vancouver, Washington. Deanna Gilbert was the second child of Herbert and Dorothy Gilbert. Ron and Deanna Larson have two children, Timothy Roland Larson and Jill Deanna Larson Im, five living grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Their first grandchild, Timothy Roland Larson II, died at birth on summer solstice, June 21, 1983.

Larson is the third generation of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who left Scandinavia to homestead in Minnesota in the late 1800s. The surnames and immigration dates of his great-grandparents are Bangen (1866, Norway), Berg (1867, Norway), Larson (1868, Norway), and Watterburg (1879, Sweden).

Larson has contributed several thousand dollars to Republican politicians, including Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and Scott Brown.