[1] Rigden died November 24, 2017, of cardiac arrest at St. Luke's Hospital in St. Louis.
He served on the faculty of his alma mater, Eastern Nazarene, as well as Middlebury College and University of Missouri–St.
He served as a National Science Foundation (NSF) consultant to the country of India in 1968 and again in 1969.
He was the United States Representative to the International Science Exhibition in Rangoon Burma in 1970.
Rigden was the author of Physics and the Sound of Music (John Wiley, 1977),[3] Rabi: Scientist and Citizen (Basic Books, 1988),[4] Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness (Harvard, 2005),[5] and Hydrogen: The Essential Element (Harvard, 2002).