We are saddened to report the death on May 17 of Emeritus Professor, Clopper Almon, who was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland for nearly 40 years.  

Clopper came to the University of Maryland in 1966, where he developed the Inforum project, continuing and extending the work he had started with Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief at
the Harvard Economic Research Project on the first computer model of the U.S. economy. Clopper brought mathematical rigor to the teaching of graduate microeconomics and econometrics at UMD.  A dedicated and engaged teacher, he supervised 44 Ph.D. theses.

In addition to his graduate courses, Clopper taught an undergraduate course in macroeconomic forecasting and model building, which required the students to use the computer. It was reported
that, for some years, 90 percent of the use of the computer by courses outside the science and mathematics departments was either by Inforum, or Clopper's students. He also initiated an enormously popular study-abroad program in Italy which he led with enthusiasm and humor. In one celebrated incident, he returned the challenge to a match by a local Italian boys soccer club
with the suggestion that they first try to beat a team made up of women in the program – forgetting, perhaps, to mention that three of them were on the Terps’ varsity squad. The University’s honor was upheld. Students followed his lectures on Roman history and society with rapt attention and often engaged in a game of “stump Clopper” by asking esoteric questions to which he somehow always knew the answer.

An unfailingly kind and generous colleague, Clopper retired from active teaching and became Professor Emeritus in 2003. He continued to work with Inforum and conduct other research from his office in Morrill Hall.  In ‘retirement’, he developed a new system of classifying Chinese characters to speed the learning of that language and edited a book on Roman gardens where everything that was learned was from plaster casts of plant roots. The world remained a source of wonder for him throughout his life.

Posted: 5/22/24