Paul Garabedian was an Armenian American mathematician whose computer computations helped lead to fuel–efficient wings for modern jetliners.

He was born in Cincinnati on August 2, 1927. He was home-schooled by his parents, who both held Harvard graduate degrees. Harvard rejected him when he applied for college in 1943, and he attended Brown University instead. After graduation (1946), he went to Harvard for his master’s (1947) and doctoral studies and completed his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1948 at the age of 21.

After working for seven years at the University of California, Berkeley (1949-1956), and three years at Stanford University (1956-1959), Garabedian joined New York University and remained there for the next 51 years in the division of computational fluid dynamics of the university’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, becoming its director in 1978. He supervised 27 dissertations from 1953 to 1997. He married and had two daughters.