(This Narrative was written in May, 2021 by Marty Hamilton based on conversations with Wil Alberda and information on the internet.)

Dr. Alberda was born in Bozeman in 1936, and raised on a farm near Churchill, MT located a few miles west of Bozeman. Churchill is at the center of Montana's largest Dutch settlement. Wil Alberda’s ancestors immigrated to Churchill from the Netherlands in the late 19th century. Churchill became for Montana the Dutch community's cultural center and the site of its original church, reputed to have been the largest wooden structure west of the Mississippi River when it was constructed.

Wil attended grade school in a one room school. He received his secondary education at the Manhattan Christian High School, Manhattan, MT, for two years , and graduated from Western Christian High School in Hull, IA. In 1959 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in education, with a mathematics major, from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. Will said of his time at Calvin College, “[the B.A.] took me five years because at the end of my sophomore year my Dad died. So I stayed home one year to run the farm until my next brother stayed home a year from college to [farm] as we took turns. Then the third brother took the farm over. ... That's where my family is and that's where we grew up. ... my grandpa was for several years a Gallatin County commissioner.”

“I applied to the Montana State College Graduate School for Fall, 1959 to get a Masters degree in mathematics education because I planned to do teaching. When I got to MSC, Dr. Hurst asked if I would be interested in a National Defense Act Fellowship. He described the benefits — how it pays your tuition, covers all expenses, and leads to a PhD. I didn’t even apply, but I said yes.” In the Acknowledgement of Wil’s dissertation, he wrote “The research reported in this thesis was supported by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Biology and Medicine Project AT(45-1) – 1729. The author is very grateful for the financial assistance received from this agency during the completion of this work and for the funds made available for the experimental investigations from which the data used in this paper was obtained.”

“I can't remember too much about my academic program nor my five years there. Jo [Joanne Ruth Kimm] and I got married in March, 1960.” She and I moved out to the Kimm farm place [near Churchill], convenient because Jo was teaching at Manhattan Christian School. I drove back and forth to Montana State College every day and did not spend much time on campus other than classes and an office room on the top floor of the Math-Physics building.”

“I did not have my first theoretical statistics course nor advanced algebra until I came into the graduate program. The standard program at that point was complex variables,  real analysis, advanced calculus, and one statistics course until I moved up into studying with Charles Mode and Charles Quesenberry where there were additional statistics courses. I worked for Charles Mode. He had a research grant going that was based on the mutation of mold on barley. That was the basis of my central limit theorem, the core of my thesis. That is, how do you approximate those kinds of results with normal theory?” In addition to the statistical theory, Wil gathered data on barley mold to which he applied his formulas. “I basically watched over the plantings of barley in the lab and the planting of mold on them to see there were any variations that would indicate mutations. I took five years to graduate from the program, Don Loftsgaarden, who came in the next year, graduated the same time I did.”

Last revised: 2021-05-14