Louis Leithold (San Francisco, United States, 16 November 1924 – Los Angeles, 29 April 2005) was an American mathematician and teacher.
[1] Known as "a legend in AP calculus circles," Leithold was the mentor of Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles high-school teacher whose story is the subject of the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver.
[4] He regularly assigned two hours of homework per night, and had two training sessions at his own house that ran Saturdays or Sundays from 9AM to 4PM before the AP test.
[7][8] One of the people he influenced was Jaime Escalante, who taught math to minority students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
[4] Leithold died of natural causes the week before his class (which he had been "relentlessly drilling" for eight months[4]) was to take the AP exam;[4] his students went on to receive top scores.