The public is invited. For more information, please call 207-786-6127. Sampson, who died April 1 at 81, in Blue Hill, was a member of the Bates faculty from 1952 until he retired as professor of mathematics in 1990. He was known for inspiring students through his passionate, creative teaching and his interest in their lives.

Participants in the June 11 gathering will include John Tagliabue, professor emeritus of English and a renowned poet, who will read a poem in Sampson’s honor; reminiscences by Sampson’s colleagues and students; and piano music by Timothy Maurice, of Oxford, a first-year student of Natasha Chances, and by Sampson’s son, Stephen Byers Sampson.

Sampson was born in Newton, Mass., in 1922 and earned his B.S. at Bowdoin in 1944. He studied at MIT in 1943 and earned his first master’s degree, in education, at Tufts University in 1947. He later earned an M.A. in mathematics at Boston University, and before coming to Bates taught at the Franklin Institute of Technology, Boston, and The New Preparatory School in Cambridge, Mass.

Each year the Sampson Lecture Fund, set up in his honor at Bates, sponsors a campus visit by a prominent mathematician who typically presents an afternoon research seminar for the mathematics department and an evening lecture for a general audience.