Elliott Ward Cheney Jr. (June 28, 1929 – July 13, 2016) was an American mathematician and an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

During undergraduate summers, Ward worked for the United States Forest Service, where he met Elizabeth "Beth" Jean, whom he married in 1952.

Cheney became a research scientist at Convair Astronautics in San Diego, California, where his mathematical team worked on calculations for the Atlas rocket—which would take John Glenn into space.

[5]: 1 In 1964, Ward joined the mathematics faculty of The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for the next 41 years, until his retirement at age 76.

[1] Cheney served continuously on the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory from its inception in 1968 until sometime after the start of 2015, and published 14 papers there.

[5]: 6–10  Special honors include an invited lectures at the 1963 National Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in Denver, Colorado, and at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Vancouver, Canada.

[5]: 11  For over 40 years, this has been the main general conference on approximation theory with presentations by international mathematician from academia, industry, and government.