Hassler Whitney (1907-1989)

Biography
Hassler Whitney was born on March 23, 1907, in New York City, where his father Edward Baldwin Whitney was the First District New York Supreme Court judge. His mother, Josepha (Newcomb) Whitney, was an artist and active in politics. His paternal grandfather was William Dwight Whitney, professor of Ancient Languages at Yale University, linguist, and Sanskrit scholar. Whitney was the great grandson of Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman. His maternal grandparents were astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), a Steeves descendant, and Mary Hassler Newcomb, granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. His great uncle Josiah Whitney was the first to survey Mount Whitney.

Throughout his life he pursued two particular hobbies with excitement: music and mountain-climbing. An accomplished player of the violin and the viola, Whitney played with the Princeton Musical Amateurs. He would run outside, 6 to 12 miles every other day. As an undergraduate, with his cousin Bradley Gilman, Whitney made the first ascent of the Whitney-Gilman ridge on Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire in 1929. It was the hardest and most famous rock climb in the East. He was a member of the Swiss Alpine Society and climbed most of the mountain peaks in Switzerland.

Three years after his third marriage, on 10 May 1989, Whitney died in Princeton,[5] after suffering a stroke.[6] In accordance with his wish, Hassler Whitney ashes rest atop mountain Dents Blanches in Switzerland where Oscar Burlet, another mathematician and member of the Swiss Alpine Club, placed them on August 20, 1989.

Marriage & Family
He married three times: his first wife was Margaret R. Howell, married on the 30 May 1930. They had three children, James Newcomb, Carol and Marian. After his first divorce, on January 16, 1955 he married Mary Barnett Garfield. He and Mary had two daughters, Sarah Newcomb and Emily Baldwin. Finally, Whitney divorced his second wife and married Barbara Floyd Osterman on 8 February 1986.