Fink—A.M. Fink, 93, on April 6, 2026, at home in Ames, Iowa. A.M. was born on December 15, 1932, in his German Russian grandparents’ home in Delmont, S.D. The youngest in a deeply religious family, he got to sit on his father’s lap as his father read from the German Bible every morning. In this intimate time he learned to read German script before dealing with English in a one-room school at age six. Being unsuited to farming because of allergies, A.M. attended Wartburg College, a trusted German Lutheran institution in distant Iowa. His parents paid his tuition, but he had a medley of odd jobs for pocket money at Wartburg. Mopping the gymnasium floor, he taught himself to balance a mop on his chin. Slotting mail in student mailboxes, he inserted original poetry along with the mail. Setting up chairs and staying for concerts, he fell in love with classical music.
Although the Fink family was nested in a German-speaking enclave in South Dakota, there was an ambient measure of anti-German sentiment that the family tended to ignore—until the county’s Selective Service drafted A.M. during his junior year at Wartburg. Never one to rage at the world, A.M. took advantage of his exposure to different kinds of people and places while in the U.S. Army, learning how to survey and using his leaves to explore the surroundings. He was a more mature and centered student when he returned to graduate from Wartburg in 1956 and enter Iowa State University as a graduate student in mathematics. While never friendless, he was more of a nerd than a mixer, completing the Iowa State doctorate degree in three years.
In 1967, A.M. returned to the Iowa State Mathematics Department after a detour through New Jersey, Virginia, and Nebraska, where he had met Deborah Walters. He and Deborah married in 1966. A.M. devoted most of his career to mathematical analysis, differential equations, inequalities, and almost periodic functions. His vita lists four books and 106 other publications. While maintaining his center of gravity at Iowa State, he took leaves for visiting positions, research stints, and conferences across the United States and around the world. Toward the end of active scholarship, he turned to game theory. His article “You Don’t Have to Settle for Less Than the Biggest Piece of Pie” describes fair and envy-free property division, a procedure he presented in seminars for judges, mediators, and lawyers.
Always a profoundly spiritual person, A.M. shifted readily into Quakerism after marriage, resonating with Rufus Jones’s memory of having been “sprinkled from morning till night with the dew of religion.” He served stints as clerk and treasurer of Ames (Iowa) Meeting. Nationally he served on boards of Friends World Committee for Consultation and Friends Publishing Corporation (2009–2018), publisher of Friends Journal. With Deborah, he attended Iowa and national gatherings of American Friends Service Committee, Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Friends General Conference. He was a stalwart of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative). In his final, intense months Deborah read to him, Turning Toward the Victim by Thomas Gates settling into their hearts in the end.
A.M. is survived by his wife, Deborah Fink; two children, George Finklang (Julie Finklang) and Philip Fink; and two grandchildren.
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