By Minnie Stephenson

In a small classroom in the basement of the University of Maryland math building, the only sound you can hear is the shuffling of feet and a faint, singsong voice reading an extremely long function. Denny Gulick has to shuffle back and forth from the ends of the blackboard to continue writing. The 86-year-old stands at only 5’4”, having to reach way up high with his chalk in hand. He has little hair left and wears a striped long sleeve button-down and a thin beige cardigan. His small head is adorned with large glasses and a plastic face shield that looks like it’s wearing him, held in place by a thick white strap around his head. 

When he’s finally done writing the function, he looks back at it with swelling pride.

“Is that cool?” he asks his class about the function. 

The students murmur. 

“Yeah, that’s a little bit cool,” he says with a smirk. 

After class, Gulick packs up his assignments and shuffles out of the room and up the stairs to his office at the end of the hallway, making sure to leave the door open in case anyone wants to say hi. 

“Teaching was just in my blood,” said Gulick, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. “My great-great-grandfather was a missionary teacher in Hawaii. My great-grandfather was a missionary teacher in Micronesia. My grandfather became famous and he was a missionary teacher in Japan. My father was born in Japan. And my father was an English professor. So it was just something that came very natural to me.”

Gulick has been teaching math at this university for 58 years. When he started, the department was much smaller, about 40 faculty members compared to today’s 90. Computer science, a common major that now intersects with Gulick’s classes, wouldn’t exist for years to come. 

Described by many as a “legend,” he has definitely made a mark at Maryland, and even nationwide with the calculus textbook he wrote almost a half-century ago. People all over campus know who he is. But what many of those people don’t know is that he’s retiring after this semester. 

Gulick isn’t the only one teaching into his old age. A 2010 survey by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America found that almost a third of college professors planned to work until at least age 70, compared to only a quarter of Americans employed in other jobs. However, not all professors have the same motivations. Gulick has kept teaching simply because he likes it, and his students like him. 

Gulick was born on July 29, 1936 in Oakland, California. Just two years later, a lifelong passion began in the most unconventional of circumstances.  

When he was only a toddler, Gulick tripped and fell onto a toy with a spike that went straight through his left eye. He had to lose the eye. 

To top it off, his doctors learned he was nearsighted when he was five years old. His father didn’t think he should be reading much with his eye issues, so he gave Gulick simple math to work on, including memorizing pi to 15 places. 

Math was a good hobby for a kid like Gulick, for reasons beyond his eye. He was allergic to milk, wheat, cats — humid or dusty air even made breathing a struggle.

“I used to tell people I was allergic to almost everything — except for girls,” he said, smiling. 

Because of all this, Gulick’s extracurriculars were limited. His size didn’t help either.

“I didn’t compete in things, partly because I was small and I didn’t want people to hit me … I was the smallest kid in the class,” said Gulick. 

When it came time to pick colleges, his parents thought he would adjust easier to a smaller, less intimidating school, so he decided to go to Oberlin College to study math and went on to earn his PhD at Yale — both alma maters of his father. 

Soon after, he started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. But Philadelphia didn’t quite suit him. 

“The very first week I was there, somebody broke into my apartment,” he said. 

After two years at Penn, someone at a mathematics conference told him he should apply to work at Maryland, and he was eager for a change. The summer before he was about to start there, though, yet another health issue arose.

His doctor found glaucoma in his right eye. The eye that already didn’t work properly. His only eye left.

“It was scary … in those days, people that got glaucoma, they were known to lose their eyesight,” Gulick said. 

Luckily, it was caught early enough to treat, and all Gulick had to do was use two eye drops a day. 

After that had been dealt with, the rest of his transition to Maryland went smoothly. He became friends with John Benedetto, a professor who started the same year as he did, in 1965. 

“We hit it off immediately,” Benedetto said. “He has a very outgoing, humorous personality.”

Benedetto wasn’t the only one Gulick befriended. Three years later, a postdoctoral fellow named Frances began at Maryland, her office right across from Gulick’s. 

Fifteen minutes after she moved into her office, Gulick asked her to get lunch with him and other colleagues. The two started dating a few weeks after that and got married the next year. They bought a house down the street and soon had three children: David, Barbara and Sharon. 

Throughout the years, not much changed. Gulick taught the same classes pretty much the same way. 

It wasn’t until years and years later that Gulick started entertaining at Pi Day. The tradition has only existed a fraction of his time at Maryland, but it is one of the highlights of his career. 

The College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences has thrown a Pi Day celebration every March 14 for about a decade. Each year Gulick takes the stage and recites the first 100 numbers of pi. 

It’s practically second nature to him. 

“When I was at graduate school, my father had birthdays, and I didn’t have anything for him that I could think of one summer, so I thought, I’m gonna learn pi,” Gulick said. “Five more places, everyday, in the shower … And on his birthday, I called him and said ‘Hi Dad. Guess what? Happy Birthday. Here’s what I know about pi.’ And so I said it from memory, 310 places, and that was my present to him.”

Of course, Pi Day isn’t the thing people remember Gulick for. He has touched many students’ lives, whether he knows it or not. 

Maddy Alizadeh, a 28-year-old doctoral student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, graduated from Maryland in 2018, and she first had Gulick her junior year.

“In STEM, a lot of the professors are researchers who don’t necessarily want to teach but they want to do research,” she said. “[Gulick] was the polar opposite of that.”

Another former student of Gulick’s is Maya Narayanasamy, an 23-year-old systems engineer from Frederick, Maryland. She also enjoyed his passion for teaching, but what she really remembers is his wit. 

The class had a “pop” quiz, even though it was the same time every week. Gulick would cover the stack of quizzes with his cardigan and joke “Shh, you guys haven’t seen anything,” she said.

Narayanasamy, a 2022 graduate, had Gulick both semesters of her freshman year. Three years later, she decided to walk up to Gulick during the Pi Day celebration. 

“I was like, ‘Hi Denny, I don’t know if you remember me but you were one of my favorite classes,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘Oh my Gosh, of course I remember you! You’ve come so far, I’m so proud of you!’” 

One can understand retiring at Gulick’s age, but why now, after 58 years? 

In the summer of 2019, Gulick’s daughter Barbara was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and intense form of brain cancer. 

Frances had retired from teaching a few years earlier, so she was able to travel to where Barbara lived in North Carolina to see her and take care of her. Gulick stayed to keep teaching.

“I felt like an orphan,” Gulick said. “But she had to be down there to help … It was a terrible situation … I don’t know how my wife survived.”

Gulick has never been able to cook for himself, so nearly every day he would go to the Subway in the math building and get himself the same order: a tuna and avocado sub. 

Only a few of his colleagues knew what was going on at the time, but he didn’t try to hide how he was feeling. 

“They can tell if you’re not smiling,” he said softly. 

Continuing the family tradition, Barbara was also a teacher. For two years she was able to keep her job and live a pretty normal life. Then things quickly got worse. 

The doctors told Gulick his daughter’s days were numbered. 

He came down to meet her and Frances and the rest of his children on Easter weekend of 2022. Near the end, Barbara couldn’t eat or get up to go to the bathroom. 

On Easter Sunday at 7 a.m., Frances walked in and told Gulick that Barbara had passed away. 

The next day, he was back at Maryland teaching. 

“It was hard,” Gulick said. “I feel two ways about that. On the one hand, it’s a nightmare to lose a daughter. On the other hand, she wasn’t hurting anymore.” 

Since Barbara’s death, Gulick said Frances has been lonely at home. 

“She wants us to move to a retirement home,” Gulick said. “I’m not super happy, but it’s not fair for my wife to have to take care of the house and all that.”

Gulick’s admirers mustn’t worry too much about him retiring, though — he will continue the other part of his job, doing the scheduling for the whole math department. And he’s not opposed to reciting pi in years to come, if he’s asked back. 

Still, if this most recent Pi Day was his last, it would be one to remember. 

Standing in front of a large backdrop branded with the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences logo and wearing yet another cardigan — this time, a festive blue and white striped one — he blasts off the first 100 numbers of pi into the microphone. He finishes in under 30 seconds, barely stopping to take a breath. 

When he’s finished reciting, he excitedly adds: “And by the way I would like to say that the next five digits — because I’m a mathematician — they’re all powers of two! It’s eight-two-one-four-eight. Ain’t that interesting?! Oh, anyway …” he trails off, blushing.

His performance is met with raucous applause and cheering from a bunch of math students and staff, all gleaming in Gulick’s light.

Featured Image: Denny recites pi on Pi Day 2023. Photo from UMD Science.