Marvin Jay Greenberg passed away in Berkeley just shy of his 82nd birthday. He was a remarkable man, beloved by many close friends, and is survived by his son, David Greenberg.

Marvin won a Ford scholarship at age 15 to attend Columbia College, after convincing the Dean that because he played golf he was not just a bookworm. Marvin received his Ph.D from Princeton in 1959 in Algebraic Geometry under the direction of the famous Serge Lang. At some point, Lang threatened to throw him out (cease advising him) if he didn't immediately solve the problem. Then, under intense pressure, he succeeded.   His 1959 thesis was Pro-Algebraic Structure on the Rational Subgroup of a P-Adic Abelian Variety.

After stints at UCB and Northeastern he joined the UCSC faculty in 1967, the same year that his famous book "lectures on Algebraic Topology" was published. 

In 1974 he published another extremely popular text "Euclidean and Non_Euclidean Geometries". In recognition for these two wonderful books and his expository article "Old and New Results in the Foundations of Elementary Plane and Non Euclidean Geometries (American Mathematical Monthly 2010) he was awarded  The Lester R. Ford Prize in expository writing from the MAA. The paper reviews and connects old results of  Archimedes, Eudoxus, Proclus, Aristotle,  and Hilbert, and introduces Marvin's own new result about Aristotle's Axiom.  

Marvin was truly was an extraordinary  mathematical expositor. He also had a great and lasting interest in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics.

He taught at UC Berkeley from 1959 to 1964, excluding a year off to study with famous A. Grothendieck. 

In 1965, he discovered the approximation theorem in arithmetical algebraic geometry named after him, known as the Greenberg functor.

In that year also he came to the new campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz,  where in subsequent years he exercised a significant influence over the hiring of mathematicians there, including the recruitement of Harold Widom, Ralph Abraham, Nick Burgoyne, Tony Trumba, Geoff Mason and Bruce Cooperstein. and in the creation of the graduate program. He remained at UCSC until his early retirement in 1993 or 1994.

Marvin was a lifelong golfer.  He also had recurrent esoteric interests.  He was personally acquainted with Krishnamurtii and with Werher Erhard, the founder of EST.   These interests combined in the Shiva Irons Society,  a golf-with-enlightenment club of which he was a founding member.

What was truly remarkable about Marvin was his profound ability to hold close friends for decades, which can be attested to by his oldest friends. It's these amazing friendships that serve as testament to his life and impact on the world.