Edward James Woods *62

Jim died March 18, 2024, in Berlin, Germany, at age 87.

Born in 1936 in Timmins, Ontario, Jim received his BSc degree in engineering physics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1957. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton in 1962. His dissertation was “Representations of the Commutation Relations Describing a Non-Relativistic Infinite Free Bose Gas.”

After a postdoc in physics at the University of Alberta, Jim became an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He joined the mathematics faculty at Queen’s in 1968, retiring in 1991. 

At Princeton, Jim met Huzihiro Araki *60, with whom he developed the “Araki-Woods” factors used in classifying Von Neumann algebras (Araki and Woods, “A Classification of Factors,” 1968). This influenced the research of French mathematician Alain Connes (1982 Fields medalist), who became a visitor at Queen’s in 1975. 

At Queen’s, Jim started the Canadian Annual Symposium on Operator Algebras. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1987. 

After retiring, Jim moved to Berlin to join his second wife, Dr. Evelyn Weimar-Woods. She survives him, as do two of three children from his first marriage, Michael and Julie; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.