Obituary of Mark Lewis Naiman

Mark Lewis Naiman, known as “Lucky,” died August 1, 2007 in Lincoln, MA. He was born May 29, 1922 in Asheville, NC, “a Tarheel born and bred.” At Chapel Hill, he majored in physics, and made Phi Beta Kappa, His first job was on the Manhattan Project in New York. He left that to enlist in the Navy. After the war, he went to graduate school at Harvard, after which he worked in Chicago at Armour Research Foundation of Illinois Tech. One of his projects there was “Cannonball,” an early satellite launched at White Sands in a captured V-2 rocket that exploded on take-off. In 1951 he moved to Philadelphia, where he worked on the first commercial computer, Univac. In 1962, he moved to Massachusetts and worked first for Mitre and then for MIT Lincoln Lab, from which he retired. Among his many patents, for which he received $1.00 each, were ink-jet printing and thin-film and silicon mempries.

Mark served on the Lincoln Democratic Committee and was active in town meeting, his intentional community, Brown’s Wood, and Valley Pond. His primary passion was gardening. He was a member of the American Rhododendron Society and a supporter of many environmental protection organizations. He bred and gave the Arnold Arboretum (and his friends) hardy trifoliate orange trees. He loved parades,fireworks, and tennis, and read copious literary and science journals. Above all, he enjoyed chamber music and was a supporter of the Lydian Quartet and the Triple Helix Piano Trio from their beginnings.

Mark’s closest friends were his three sons: Joris of Waltham, Alaric of Lincoln, and Kieron of South Deerfield, Joris’s wife, Lesya Struz, and his own wife of 60 years, Adeline Lubell Naiman.