Hazleton “Terry” Mirkil III, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth

In the Winter Trimester of my freshman year at Dartmouth College, I took the second of my two math courses, which were required of part of the college’s “distributive requirements.” The term refers to courses in fields that don’t interest you so that you could become a well-rounded person. The course was called something like “Introduction to Probability and Statistics,” though it was mostly the former.

There are only two things I remember about the course. The first is that in any random group of thirteen people, there is an even chance that two of the party share the same birthday. (That was more than I can recall about my previous math course on Calculus.)

The other thing I remember were Professor Hazleton Mirkil’s wild eyebrows. In profile, they stood out like wild antennae reaching up to an inch from his brow. His eyebrows come to mind because I seem to have developed the same antenna-like eyebrows. When I get a haircut, my barber trims them for me, though they always grow back thrusting in all directions.

Thinking about Professor Mirkil’s eyebrows, I decided to see what I could find out about him on the Internet. What I found was not much, inasmuch as he had committed suicide in 1967, the year after I graduated from Dartmouth. According to the West Lebanon Valley News:

Hazelton Mirkil III, 44, associate professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, was found dead Wednesday afternoon in the woods back of Chase Field. Dr. I. A. Dinerman of Canaan Grafton County medical referee attributed death to suicide by shooting. He said that Prof. Mirkil, was “dead at least a month or two,” was shot through the head and found with a revolver in his hand.

Prof. Mirkil was on leave from Dartmouth for the current academic year and had been at the Veterans Hospital at Northampton, Mass. Having obtained leave from the hospital and not having returned,
he was reported missing March 17.

Very likely, my Math prof received a bad diagnosis from the VA Hospital. The above photo was the only one I could find except for a tiny picture in uniform during WW2. That’s typical for people whose lives have ended well before the advent of the Internet.

I never was much good in math. I received a C+ in both Calculus and Probability. I am certainly not a graduate that the Math Department at Dartmouth would be proud of. (Nor the English Department, as I ended that last sentence with a preposition.)

If you fear that I, too, would blow my brains out because of my unruly eyebrows, don’t worry. I am too funny-looking on a number of counts to worry solely about my eyebrows.