Roger Baumann, professor with varied interests

A professor of electrical engineering at University of Massachusetts at Lowell for 27 years, Roger Henri Baumann had developed innovative ways of keeping his students engaged.

In front of a packed lecture hall, he would ensure that his class was awake by demonstrating a simple electrical circuit that, unbeknownst to the students, was designed to overheat. With his back turned to the class, Dr. Baumann would plot voltage levels on a graph as the circuit resistor started to smoke. As more and more students started to call out his name, he would finally turn around and feign surprise.

"He was a fantastic teacher; he was even an entertainer," said former colleague George Cheney, a professor who cotaught with Dr. Baumann at UMass-Lowell in the late 1960s and had often witnessed the stunt. "The classes he taught are the first electrical engineering courses that our students take. They're so fundamental that almost everything else [taught in the program] depends on them. You need someone good to teach them."

Dr. Bauman, retired professor and former chairman of the electrical engineering department at UMass-Lowell, died July 9 of cardiac arrest at Massachusetts General Hospital during a routine cardiac CT scan. He was 79.

Dr. Baumann's interests were not confined to the sciences, but were also rooted in a creative side, said his wife, Priscilla.

A skilled photographer, Dr. Baumann had a love for picture-taking that had been instilled in him by his father, and he shared that passion with his own children. He honed his skills over the years in a darkroom set up in the basement of the family's home in Winchester.

For the past two decades, after their three children went to college, Dr. Baumann and his wife traveled the countryside of France each summer, exploring medieval architectural sites.

He took extensive photographs, which were published with scholarly articles written by his wife. Priscilla Baumann, who teaches seminars at Radcliffe College and Lesley University, said she uses his photographs as an integral part of her lessons.

"The slides are just so striking that people always ask, 'How did Roger ever do that?' " she said. "He had infinite patience. He would take half an hour to set up a tripod, while others will just snap away. He assessed what had to be done as if he were a painter."

Born in Geneva, Dr. Baumann grew up in Great Neck on New York's Long Island, where he fell in love with math and science. After graduating from high school, he put dreams of attending MIT on hold and enlisted in the US Navy. He was trained as a radar technician, but before he was sent overseas, the war ended.

In the mid-1940s, Dr. Baumann finally enrolled at MIT, graduating in 1953. In 1955, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study advanced mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris, an honor that was extended for a second year when he entered the school's doctoral program.

In 1959, he attended a Mardi Gras masked ball for Fulbright scholars, portraying a comedic French literary character, Major Thompson. There, Dr. Baumann met Priscilla FitzGerald, a French literature student, who had decided only at the last minute to attend the dance and had thrown together a Japanese kimono and a lampshade hat for a costume. They married in 1961.

After a year in the United States, in 1962 the couple returned to Paris, where Dr. Baumann worked in research development in the radar division of Compagnie Generale de Telegraphie Sans Fil. In 1968, Dr. Baumann and his wife and three young children moved back to the United States, where he took a job at UMass-Lowell. He taught there until he retired in December 1994.

"He loved to teach, and people loved to learn from him," his wife said. Since her husband's death, she said, she has heard from former students and colleagues about how much his teaching had done for them.

His daughter, Caroline, said that her father spent hours with her going over geometry homework and constructing "impossible proofs" for her to solve.

His sons, Philippe of Brooklyn and Robert of Dallas, both remember one-on-one lessons in sailing and carpentry with their father, who was also known for his culinary skills, inherited from his French mother and honed at classes he once took at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

"He was such a multifaceted, Renaissance man," Caroline said. "He taught us the appreciation of the details of life."

In addition to his wife, daughter, and two sons, Dr. Baumann leaves a brother, Claude of Upper Saddle River, N.J.; and a sister, Paulette Tymowska of Geneva.

A service was held.