The value of giving back is something ingrained in Robert Fossum. Growing up with the Lutheran ideals and Norwegian heritage that imbue so much of the smalltown tapestry of rural Minnesota, he learned the importance of giving for its own sake.

So it's not surprising that he and his wife established the Robert and Robin Fossum Distinguished Lecture Series at the Beckman Institute, or that they have been content to let others choose the visiting lecturers for it. But this year's lecture was different.

"I'm turning 70 on May 1 and I'm retiring on the 15th of May, so this time Robin asked if we could have a lecture around the 1st of May and she said she knew exactly who she wanted to get," Robert Fossum said.

Fossum's choice for speaker was fitting: a world-renowned mathematician and physicist from Harvard named Arthur Jaffe whose many honors include being past president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The Lecture Series has had speakers from top-level Microsoft executives to nationally-known cognitive scientists, but the choice of an imminent mathematician was a personal one for Fossum. He is retiring after a long career that saw him make major contributions to the Illinois Department of Mathematics and to the field of mathematics through his research and work with AMS.

Fossum grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, famous for thwarting a daring 1876 bank robbery that spelled the beginning of the end for the James gang, and for being home to two well-respected small colleges. His father ran the school's bookstore at St. Olaf's College and his uncle was chair of the college's physics department.

"It was very intellectually stimulating," Fossum said of his childhood environment.

"The bookstore at that time was in the St. Olaf College library building and he had keys to every place there, so I would go up there on Saturdays with him and go back into stacks of the library. It wasn't like it is today with security; I had total access to everything in that library."

It was there that Fossum began exploring his intellectual and scientific interests. A master key to the physics building courtesy of his uncle helped him unlock the door to applications.

"I had access to the machine shop and the classrooms and all of the laboratories," he said. "I probably didn't make the best use of it, but my friends and I around '55 or '56 used the physics lab to make rockets."

Using the machine shop's lathe, some pipe, and some homemade gunpowder, Fossum and his high school buddies began their own rocket program.

"One of the guys was a chemist and he would make gunpowder and we'd fill these things with gunpowder and an old flash bulb that we had broken the glass out of and stand a ways away, connect to the battery, and watch these things go aloft," Fossum said with a laugh. "Nowadays we would be declared terrorists."

Fossum's scientifically adventurous sprit didn't end there: he earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Michigan before joining the faculty at Illinois in 1964. It was early in his career here that Fossum learned about the Fulbright Scholar program, an international exchange program that allows American faculty members to teach and learn abroad. Both sets of his grandparents were born in Norway, so he applied for and was accepted for a year teaching at the University of Oslo.