Decades before Eric Maskin won a Nobel Prize in economics, a young researcher named William V. Gehrlein was working alongside him on a paper about how groups of voters choose a winner. Gehrlein, a physicist turned business professor who spent nearly fifty years mapping the mathematics of elections, died peacefully on July 17, 2026, in Lewes, Delaware. He was 80.

He was born June 8, 1946, in Erie, Pennsylvania, to Vincent and Eunice (Knauff) Gehrlein, and graduated from the city's McDowell High School in 1964, where he ran cross-country and competed in wrestling and track. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Gannon College in 1968, then served in the U.S. Army before returning to Pennsylvania State University for graduate study, completing a master's degree in physics and, in 1975, a Ph.D. in business administration, according to his obituary published by Parsell Funeral Homes.

That degree carried him to the University of Delaware, where he taught operations management for more than three decades and built a research career around a single, quietly obsessive question: how mathematics could describe the odds that an election produces a clear winner, a tie, or a paradox. He published more than 125 journal articles, fourteen book chapters and fifty conference proceedings papers on operations management, social choice theory, statistics and mathematics, with his work presented in twelve countries, according to the University of Delaware's Lerner College of Business and Economics. Among that body of work were two papers written with economist Eric Maskin, who would go on to share the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; their 1979 paper on majority voting, co-authored with Peter C. Fishburn, appeared decades before Maskin's prize.

Gehrlein carried that research into classrooms far from Delaware. He taught in the university's Executive MBA and DuPont MBA programs, and under USAID grants he lectured in Varna, Bulgaria, and Sarajevo, Bosnia, with additional stints in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the University of Caen in France. One of his doctoral students in Caen, Eric Kamwa, wrote after Gehrlein's death that their conversations "gave a new direction to my research and shaped my work in ways I still carry with me today." Maurice Salles, a longtime friend and fellow social choice theorist at Caen, remembered him as "tremendously efficient as associate editor of Social Choice and Welfare," the journal where Gehrlein served on the editorial board.

The field returned that regard. A 2021 volume, Evaluating Voting Systems with Probability Models, was published as a Festschrift in his honor, one of his findings was cited in Amartya Sen's Nobel Prize lecture, and his web of mathematical collaborations gave him an Erdos number of two.

At Delaware, Hemant Kher, whose office sat next to Gehrlein's from 1999 onward, knew a different side of that same mind: quiet mentorship paired with a dry wit. Of a well-known figure in their field, Kher recalled Gehrlein smiling and saying, "He's not like us, but importantly, we're not like him." Outside his research, Gehrlein ran regularly, traced his family's genealogy, fished from Maine's lakes to Alaska's Kachemak Bay, traveled widely through Europe and North America, and built a log cabin by hand in Maine.

He is survived by his wife of twenty-five years, Barbara Eller; two stepdaughters and their spouses; six grandchildren; two brothers; and a sister. A celebration of his life was held July 25, 2026, in Newark, Delaware.

What Gehrlein built stays legible in the field he spent a lifetime studying: more than 125 papers still consulted by researchers working through the same puzzles of majority rule and paradox, a Festschrift carrying his name, and former students such as Kamwa now posing the same questions to classrooms of their own. Closer to home, the more private evidence of him persists too, in the log cabin he raised by hand in Maine and in the office next door at Delaware, where for a quarter century a colleague could count on finding him, and his humor, right where he left them.