William Schumacher Massey was born on August 23, 1920, in Granville, Illinois and died on June 17, 2017.

He was an American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology.

The product was named for him.

Massey worked also on the formulation of spectral sequences by means of exact couples, and wrote several textbooks, including A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology (ISBN 0-387-97430-X).

Massey was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago.

When he completed serving in the U. S. Navy during World War II he received a PhD degree from Princeton University in 1949.

Massey dissertation, entitled Classification of mappings of an (n+1)-dimensional space into an n-sphere, was written under the direction of Norman Steenrod.

Massey spent two additional years at Princeton as a post-doctoral research assistant.

Massey then taught for ten years on the faculty of Brown University. From 1960 till his retirement he was a professor at Yale University.

William S. Massey passed away at 96 years old.