Obituary of James Kevin Mullin

February 9, 1940 - July 21, 2024

Jim Mullin passed away around 9:00 am in the Toronto General Hospital. He had travelled from Canmore to Toronto four days earlier to spend time with his daughter Amy, son-in-law Glenn, and grandchildren Sean, Peter, and Julia. Shortly after his arrival, he suffered an aneurysm, and surgery was performed to deal with that. Complications from the surgery led to his death the following day. Although fully aware of the seriousness of the surgery, he was upbeat and optimistic for a good outcome until the very end.

Jim will be remembered in many ways – as an academic, a researcher, a father, grandfather, friend, and husband. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1963 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering. His distinguished career included employment with Bell Lab in New Jersey, World Health Organization in Geneva, and as a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Western Ontario until his retirement in 1998. Dynamic hashing and Bloom filters (memory storage and retrieval) were his main areas of research, and his writing, published in such journals as The Computer Journal, Information Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, is still widely cited today.

Jim is predeceased by his parents Margaret and John Mullin and his cousins, John and Charlie Rosemeyer. He is survived by his daughters Amy (Glenn Cuthbertson) and Gretchen (Michal Sawicki) as well as by his sons Joshua (Martha Dieboll) and Michael and his stepchildren Gus Ayim (Sandy Wood) and Martha Ayim. The proud grandfather of Sean, Peter, Julia, Max, Alexander, Charlotte, Finn, Kyler, Miranda, and Avery, he will be deeply missed by all those he leaves behind. His mother-in-law, Anne Neely, as well as his sister-in-law, Lynda Layode, and brother-in-law Jimi Layode are much saddened by his passing.

Jim was well known among his friends as an outdoorsman, hiker, world traveler, garage sale aficionado, appreciator of red wine, hike leader, bridge player, and wildflower photographer. He will be mourned by many including his friends Pat, Chris, Frances, Linda (his bridge partner), and Mary. He and his wife, Maryann Ayim, shared many things, including a blended family, literature, travel, cruising, skiing, snowshoeing, mountain hiking and scrambling, good food, and learning Spanish on Duolingo. In later life, bad health denied Jim the more active of these enterprises, but he continued to be a loyal and enthusiastic member of the Meanderthals, the Canmore Seniors Association hiking group. He hiked with the D group and to his great joy, led a hike to Flowing Waters and Many Springs in Bow Valley Provincial Park on June 26, 2024. To his wife, Maryann Ayim, he taught lightness of heart, and she will never forget that gift. A Memorial Service will be held in Canmore in a few weeks, centering around sprinkling Jim’s ashes in one of the many mountain vistas he held dear to his heart.