Thomas J. Osler

In 2009, the New Jersey Section of the Mathematical Association of America gave him their Distinguished Teaching Award. A mathematics conference was held at Rowan University in honor of his 70th birthday in 2010.

In 1980, Osler was inducted into the Road Runners Club of America Hall of fame.

Osler taught at Saint Joseph's University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before joining the mathematics department at Rowan University in New Jersey in 1972; he is a full professor at Rowan University.

Osler has won three national Amateur Athletic Union championships at 25 km (1965), 30 km and 50 mi (1967). Osler won the 1965 Philadelphia Marathon, finishing the race in freezing-cold weather in a time of 2:34:07. In the course of his career he has won races of nearly every length from one mile to 100 miles.

Osler was involved in the creation of the Road Runners Club of America with Olympian Browning Ross; together they were elected as co-secretaries in 1959 and were among the four first official elected officers of the newly formed club. He served on the Amateur Athletic Union Standards Committee in 1979. He has been credited with helping to popularize the idea of walk breaks among US marathon runners.

Thomas Joseph Osler (born 1940) is an American mathematician, former national champion distance runner, and author.

Born in 1940 in Camden, New Jersey, Osler graduated from Camden High School in 1957 and then studied physics at Drexel University, graduating in 1962. He completed his PhD at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, in 1970. His dissertation, Leibniz Rule, the Chain Rule, and Taylor's Theorem for Fractional Derivatives, was supervised by Samuel Karp.