Howard Levi

Howard Levi (November 9, 1916 in New York City – September 11, 2002 in New York City) was an American mathematician who worked mainly in algebra and mathematical education. Levi was very active during the educational reforms in the United States, having proposed several new courses to replace the traditional ones.
Biography.
Levi earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1942 as a student of Joseph Fels Ritt. Soon after obtaining his degree, he became a researcher on the Manhattan Project.
At Wesleyan University he led a group that developed a course of geometry for high school students that treated Euclidean geometry as a special case of affine geometry. Much of the Wesleyan material was based on his book "Foundations of Geometry and Trigonometry".
His book "Polynomials, Power Series, and Calculus", written to be a textbook for a first course in calculus, presented an innovative approach, and received favorable reviews by Leonard Gillman, who wrote "[...] this book, with its wealth of imaginative ideas, deserves to be better known."
Levi's reduction process is named after him.
In his last years, he tried to find a proof of the four color theorem that did not rely on computers.