Theodore Lawrence "Ted" Brown

Green Bay is the childhood claim: a Depression kid who asked for a chemistry set at Christmas and can still picture the little basement bench where he put it.

He was born in Green Bay on October 15, 1928, and raised there through the Depression. That curiosity took him to the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S. 1950), the Navy (1950–53), a Michigan State Ph.D. (1956), and then the University of Illinois, where a supposedly temporary teaching job became thirty-seven years. He was a physical inorganic chemist—intermolecular exchange in main-group organometallics, the unglamorous mechanics that later fed pharmaceutical work—and, more famously, co-author with H. Eugene LeMay of Chemistry: The Central Science, first published in 1977 and still a bestseller many editions later.

As vice chancellor for research he helped land Arnold and Mabel Beckman’s forty-million-dollar gift, then served as founding director of the Beckman Institute from 1987 to 1993. He supervised sixty-one Ph.D. students and twenty-eight postdocs before retiring from teaching in 1993. Late in life he published historical fiction and kept a climate-science blog, Science Oracle. The Beckman-Brown Lecture at Illinois is named for him; he and Audrey endowed undergraduate scholarships there. He died on March 24, 2026, at ninety-seven.