Jim Hlavka passed away in his sleep from a stroke on May 2, 2024, perhaps brought on by COVID the previous year.

Jim grew up in Palo Alto, California, the eldest of four siblings. As a student at Cubberly High School, he read all the puzzle books in the local library and swam on the swim team before going off to Harvey Mudd College in southern California.  There, he met Christine "Chris" Vaughan, a student at Pomona College, when they both joined a club to learn the game of go (aka wei chi). Jim and Chris married in 1970 and drove off to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics. He studied prime numbers and learned to write computer programs on punch cards.  They lived in co-operative housing and were part of a grocery co-operative where Jim's masterful estimation skills were applied to the weight of wheels of cheese.

Jim and Chris moved to Kansas for several years, where he was an instructor at the University of Kansas. There he learned about different types of wheat, which he applied later in life when he taught himself to bake 100% whole-wheat bread with a bread machine.

Jim and Chris soon moved to Los Altos, California, where they were both able to work and be near family.  Jim worked for Lockheed for the rest of his career.  His computer programming work included inverting very large matrices and introducing appropriate estimation methods for physical behavior at boundaries.

Jim was a loving husband to Chris and a loving father to their daughter Eileen. He shared his enthusiasm for math, science and the outdoors with Eileen from an early age. Jim and Chris took turns cooking dinner and ate together nearly every day while Eileen was growing up and then for their remaining 54 years of marriage.  They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a trip to Europe, including visiting Prague, where Jim's great grandparents were married. Jim and Chris hiked about weekly throughout the Bay Area in some of their later years.

Jim maintained his enthusiasm for go throughout his life, attending most of the American Go Association's go congresses and playing as an amateur three dan for many years.  He played contract and duplicate bridge with old and new friends including at the Palo Alto Bridge Center and sorted foreign language books for the Mountain View-Los Altos Friends of the Library.

Jim will be sorely missed. Remembrances can be left on this website's guestbook or sent directly to the family.

In lieu of flowers, donations in his name may be made to the Am erican Go Foundation , which supports teaching go to children and students of all ages.