Magnus Wenninger, American mathematician, Died at 97

  Educator

Father Magnus J. Wenninger was born on October 31, 1919, and died on February 17, 2017.

He was an American mathematician.

Wenninger worked on constructing polyhedron models and wrote the first book on their construction.

His parents were German immigrants in Park Falls, Wisconsin, Joseph Wenninger always knew he was going to be a priest.

As of an early age, which was understood that his brother Heinie would take after their father and become a baker and that Joe, as he was then known, would go into the priesthood.

After Wenninger was thirteen, after graduating from the parochial school in Park Falls, Wisconsin, his parents saw an advertisement in the German newspaper Der Wanderer that would help to shape the rest of his life.

That ad was for a preparatory school in Collegeville, Minnesota, associated with the Benedictine St. John’s University.

When admitting to feeling homesick at first, Wenninger quickly made friends and, after a year, knew that this was where he needed to be.

Wenninger was a student in a section of the prep school that functioned as a “minor seminary” – later moving on into St. John’s where he studied philosophy and theology, which led into the priesthood.

Magnus Wenninger passed 97 years old.