I met Stephen Meyer in Feb­ru­ary 1999 when I signed up for 17.319, Envi­ron­men­tal Pol­i­tics and Pol­icy. I might have been a young and impres­sion­able fresh­man at MIT, but that was not a pre­req­ui­site to hav­ing Pro­fes­sor Meyer make an impres­sion on you.

His sheer breadth of sci­en­tific knowl­edge and his uncanny abil­ity to mesh it in great detail with diverse, seem­ingly unre­lated sub­jects was eye-opening. A nat­ural lec­turer, he had the comedic tim­ing of a pro­fes­sional stand-up and hon­est, bot­tom­less enthu­si­asm for his sub­ject mat­ter that could infect even the most lan­guid undergraduate.

Upon my return to MIT in 2004, I was sur­prised to dis­cover that Pro­fes­sor Meyer’s polit­i­cal inter­ests were so diverse that he also taught 17.471, Amer­i­can National Secu­rity Pol­icy. The Polit­i­cal Sci­ence office spoke about the class in rev­er­ent tones, but I didn’t need their encour­age­ment to sign up. Every­thing I had heard was true. Once again he stunned me with his wealth of knowl­edge, keen insight, and rich expe­ri­ences. There was a run­ning joke that his old friend Condi Rice was sup­posed to come and do a guest lec­ture for us, but she always had another appointment.

Not long into the term, Meyer appeared at lec­ture with an intra­venous tube con­nected to a small waist-mounted pouch. This, he explained, was a portable chemother­apy pump. He quickly and offhand­edly men­tioned that the can­cer that he had sur­vived a few years back had returned, but he had been through this rou­tine before and it was not going to be a big deal. He explained that he might occa­sion­ally appear tired, or lose his voice, but noth­ing else—not even his fash­ion­able bald spot—was going to change. He resumed his lec­tur­ing and never men­tioned it again.

True to his word, Pro­fes­sor Meyer slogged his way through the term, deliv­er­ing impec­ca­bly orga­nized and well-considered lec­tures to my class and sev­eral oth­ers. He con­tin­ued advis­ing scores of grad­u­ate stu­dents. Some­how he kept up with his research, his writ­ing, and his com­mu­nity work. Some­times, mid-lecture, his voice would fal­ter and he would pause for just a moment to rest. The class would wait pen­sively until the awk­ward silence was dis­missed with a quick joke and a smile, and the lec­ture would move on.

At the last lec­ture, Pro­fes­sor Meyer thanked us all for being such great stu­dents. Our inter­est and enthu­si­asm meant a lot to him, he said, since this would be the last time the class is offered. The class was one of the best I’d ever taken at MIT. Why on earth would they can­cel it? I asked this ques­tion of my TA, Jes­sica, as I handed in my final exam on Decem­ber 14.

“Steve’s can­cer is ter­mi­nal, and he won’t make it through the next year,” she whis­pered to me in front of the remain­ing test-takers. “But don’t tell any­one I told you that. He doesn’t want peo­ple feel­ing sorry for him. He wants every­one to focus on the mate­r­ial, and he wants to keep teach­ing it right up to the end because teach­ing means every­thing to him.”

Her com­ment moved me greatly.

Stephen Meyer was suc­cess­ful in many pur­suits. As a gov­ern­ment con­sul­tant, he advised the Rea­gan and Bush admin­is­tra­tions on the com­plex nuances of national secu­rity pol­icy dur­ing a tur­bu­lent period of inter­na­tional change. As a friendly cit­i­zen, knowl­edge­able sci­en­tist, and heart­felt advo­cate of the envi­ron­ment he lived in, he took devel­op­ers on “nature hikes” to show them up close the plants and ani­mals their work would dis­place. As a teacher, he indeli­bly impressed upon his stu­dents not just details of envi­ron­men­tal calami­ties and secu­rity deba­cles but broader ways of under­stand­ing the inter­play between com­plex sys­tems, the polit­i­cal machine, and the pub­lic. He made seem­ingly spe­cial­ized fields rel­e­vant to every­day life.

Stephen Meyer died Decem­ber 10 at age 54.