Born in
New York City, Levine received his
B.S. from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958, and his
Ph.D. in
mathematics from
Princeton University in 1962, studying under
Norman Steenrod. He began his career as an instructor at M.I.T., after which he spent a year at the
University of Cambridge under a
National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. He became a professor at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1964, and in 1966 he left for
Brandeis University. His early work helped to develop
surgery theory as a powerful tool in knot theory and in
geometric topology. In 1970 he was an Invited Speaker at the
International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice. Jerome Levine died after a long and hard-fought battle with
lymphatic cancer at the age of 68. He was an active mathematician at Brandeis until his death, with his last paper published four months after he died. ==References==