Michael F. Dacey

Michael F. Dacey, Senior Associate Dean in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, passed away December 23, 2006, in Evanston, Illinois. He had been a member of the Northwestern faculty since 1964 and served as Chair of the Department of Geography from 1976 to 1983. Dacey received AAG honors for Meritorious Contribution in 1971. A pioneer in the field of quantitative geography, Dacey received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1960. In the following decade he contributed more than two dozen papers to the major journals of geography and regional science on point pattern analysis, central place theory, city-size distributions, and urban population density. His NSF-funded summer institutes and occasional conferences in quantitative geography were influential in guiding the growth of the discipline into the early 1970s. Dacey’s focus had turned to undergraduate education by the mid-1970s. Dacey founded what would become a highly successful honors program at Northwestern University, Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. The program flourishes today and has graduated hundreds of majors since its inception in 1978.

Michael F. Dacey (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(2): 20.