Ward Cheney (1929--2016) was a Professor of Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin. Elliott Ward Cheney, Jr., graduated from Fountain Hill High School, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1947, and received a B.A. degree in mathematics from Lehigh University, in 1951. At The University of Kansas, he was an Instructor of mathematics and was awarded a Ph.D. degree in 1957. After several years working in the aerospace industry in southern California (Convair Astronautics in San Diego and Space Technology Laboratory near Los Angeles), he began his academic career by teaching at Iowa State University and UCLA before joining the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1964. Also, Dr. Cheney has been a Visiting Professor at Michigan State University and Lund University, Sweden.

Professor Cheney has done research in numerical analysis and approximation theory. He has supervised seventeen Ph.D. students and thirty-four Masters students. He has been an Associate Editor for ten mathematical journals as well as being a referee for numerous others. He has given more than a hundred and sixty-five invited lectures and colloquium talks at universities and conferences around the world. Special honors included an invited lectures he gave at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics National Meeting in Denver, Colorado, 1963, and at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, Canada, 1974. Dr. Cheney was the honoree at the International Conference on Approximation Theory in 1995. During his career, he has been awarded numerous grants for his research in approximation theory.

Professor Cheney has over a hundred published papers and is the author of eleven textbooks in mathematics, with several having multiple editions. His first book An Introduction to Approximation Theory was published in 1966 and is considered a classical textbook that is still in print. He has co-authored two textbooks with David Kincaid on Numerical Mathematics and Computing and Numerical Analysis written for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively. Recently, they have published an undergraduate textbook on Linear Algebra: Theory and Applications. Also, Ward Cheney has written two graduate level books with Will Light: A Course in Approximation Theory and Approximation Theory in Tensor Product Spaces. Professor Cheney spent many summers in England doing research with Professor Light at Lancaster University and Leicester University.

Ward and Beth Cheney had three children: Margaret Cheney is a Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University, Elliott Ward Cheney, III, is a professional cellist, and David Warren Cheney is a science and technology policy consultant.

In addition to his family, mathematics, and UT Austin, his interests included daily exercise and playing the clarinet with a group of musicians.

Ward and his wife Victoria were interested in genealogy, and they have a great deal of information about his family's ancestry, including the surnames Cheney, DeWolf, Bemis, Jenks, Goddard, Ward, Thayer, Brailey, Stevens, Pratt, Wheaton, and so on. A genealogy of this branch of the Cheney family has been written by Charles Pope. Long out of print, this book is available in a set of 24 PDP files. A zip file containing these files is available by clicking on POPE to see or download this book.

Professor Cheney maintained a list of piano trios (piano, violin/clarinet/viola, and cello). These are either written for clarinet or can be played by clarinet using suitable transposition from the violin part. To see it, click TRIOS