William Massey was born in
Granville, Illinois, in 1920, the son of Robert and Alma Massey, and grew up in
Peoria. He was an undergraduate student at the
University of Chicago. After serving as a meteorologist aboard aircraft carriers in the
United States Navy for 4 years during
World War II, he received a
Ph.D. degree from
Princeton University in 1949. His dissertation, titled
Classification of mappings of an (n+1)-dimensional space into an n-sphere, was written under the direction of
Norman Steenrod. He spent two additional years at Princeton as a post-doctoral research assistant. He then taught for ten years on the faculty of
Brown University. In 1958 he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1960 till his retirement he was a professor at
Yale University. He died on June 17, 2017, in
Hamden, Connecticut. He had 23 PhD students, including Donald Kahn, Larry Smith, and
Robert Greenblatt. ==Selected works==