Roland "Ron" Edwin Larson (born October 31, 1941) is a professor of mathematics at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Pennsylvania.

[1] He is best known for being the author of a series of widely used mathematics textbooks ranging from middle school through the second year of college.

Mederith Larson served in active duty during World War II, where he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart, and the Korean War, where he was awarded an Oak Leaf Cluster and a Silver Star.

[2] During the years that Ron was growing up, his father was stationed in several military bases, including Chitose, Hokkaido, Japan and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

When Mederith Larson retired from the Army in 1957, he moved with his family to Vancouver, Washington, where he lived until he died (at the age of 89) in 2005.

In 1957, when his family moved to Vancouver, Washington, Larson enrolled in Battle Ground High School, where he graduated in 1959.

Their first grandchild, Timothy Roland Larson II, died at birth on summer solstice, June 21, 1983.

Larson is the third generation of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who left Scandinavia to homestead in Minnesota in the late 1800s.

Larson has contributed several thousand dollars to Republican politicians, including Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and Scott Brown.

[8] Larson's Ph.D. lineage, as listed by the North Dakota State University, traces back through George David Birkhoff, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the co-developer of calculus.

[11] "When Marilyn Monroe was asked if she had been lucky in her career, she said 'When you have a single dream it is more than likely to come true---because you keep working toward it without getting mixed up.'

The cottage had been part of the original estate of Ernst Behrend, founder of Hamermill Paper Company.

[25] During his first few years as an assistant professor at Penn State Erie, Larson continued to do research in the area of his dissertation.

Until 2008, all of Larson's textbooks were published by D. C. Heath, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Prentice Hall, and McDougal Littell.

In 2008, Larson was unable to find a publisher for a new series for middle school to follow the 2006 "Focal Point" recommendations of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

[28] According to his acceptance speech for the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1998, Ron's interest in writing mathematics textbooks started the summer after his sophomore year in college.

I had forgotten my high school algebra and trig, and I had to spend my sophomore year taking those courses over again.

After I was accepted to Lewis & Clark, I made an appointment to talk with the math department chair, Elvy Fredrickson.

She went to a bookshelf in her office in the old math building, scanned the titles, took down a calculus text, handed it to me, and said, 'Study this book during the summer.