Richard Patterson Jerrard died at Carle Hospital on July 23, 2014, his 89th birthday, after a long illness. The son of Leigh Patterson Jerrard and Lillian Taylor Jerrard, he was born and grew up in Winnetka, Illinois where he attended public schools. He spent childhood summers in a log cabin on the Brule River in northwest Wisconsin with his family. His love for the north woods remained with him throughout his life.

In the summer of 1943, he graduated from New Trier High School, and then enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was sent to a hotel in Miami Beach, where he roomed with seven other recruits, to begin basic training. In the spring of 1945 after flight training, he received his wings and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was sent to Madison, Wisconsin, where his tall thin physique and scholarly ways earned him the nickname, "the Flying Pencil". He made many practice flights while he waited for orders to go overseas to Japan as a pilot on a B-17 Flying Fortress. The Japanese surrendered, the war ended, and he was discharged.

Following the war, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. At first he was assigned to the same barracks at Truax Field that he had lived in while in the Air Corps. In later years he liked to recall that, when an attractive female classmate asked him what he had done in the war and he told her he had been a pilot, she replied, "That's what they all say."

He received his bachelors and master's degree in mechanical engineering from Wisconsin in the spring of 1950. That fall he began to work as an engineer at a research laboratory at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, under the supervision of Hillel Poritsky. He met his future wife, Dr Poritsky's daughter, when invited home for dinner.

In 1954 he started to work on his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D.in 1957 and went to work at Bell Telephone Laboratory in Summit, New Jersey, joining a group researching vibrations in quartz crystals. He felt that there he was getting far away from mathematics. He began to look for a job in academia after visiting Ann Arbor in June 1958 to obtain his doctoral hood. Very soon afterwards he received, by phone, an offer from the University of Illinois's mathematics department, which he accepted on the spot. In September 1958 he came to Champaign-Urbana to begin teaching and remained here until he retired in 1995, writing and publishing over twenty papers in mathematics journals.

His mathematical research was unusually broad by today's standards, and included papers in the applied mathematics, algebraic topology, number theory, complex analysis. He is remembered for a theorem in which he proved that, given any simple closed (analytic) curve on the plane, there exists a square whose vertices all sit on the curve; in 2007 he was awarded the George PA