Thomas Richard Dyckman

Dyckman died on 30 October 2026 in Naples, Florida, at the age of 94. No cause of death was made public. A family obituary was published on 31 October, and Cornell University announced his death on 4 November 2026. He was survived by his wife of more than 70 years, Ann, their four children, ten grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, with another on the way.

Thomas Richard Dyckman was born on 25 February 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up on the south side of Chicago. He was adopted at a young age by Wilderine and Clovis Dyckman, who, his family later wrote, were immensely proud of his accomplishments.

He studied at the University of Michigan, earning a bachelor's degree in actuarial mathematics, an MBA and a PhD, completed in 1962. At Michigan he met Alice Ann Pletta, and they married in 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he served in the United States Navy's Intelligence Office.

In 1961 Dyckman joined the University of California, Berkeley, to teach intermediate accounting and statistics. The Berkeley accounting faculty of the time stimulated his interest in research, and a field study he undertook there was published in 1964 in the young Journal of Accounting Research.

He joined Cornell University in 1964 as an associate professor, was promoted to professor in 1968 and was named Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Accounting in 1977. He was an early champion of empirical methods and conducted influential research on the impact of accounting disclosures on market prices. He wrote or co-wrote more than 60 journal articles and 11 books and monographs. He twice received the AICPA and American Accounting Association Notable Contribution to the Literature award, for his 1966 article on earnings trends, size and inventory valuation, and for the monograph Efficient Capital Markets and Accounting: A Critical Analysis, written with David Downs and Robert Magee.

At Cornell he served as associate dean of academic affairs from 1984 to 1994 and as acting dean of the Johnson School, and he was the university's vice president for information technology from 1998 to 1999. He coordinated Cornell's Executive Development Program from 1970 to 1996 and won the AAA Outstanding Educator Award. Beyond the university he sat on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council, was a trustee of the Financial Accounting Foundation from 1989 to 1993, and served the American Accounting Association as director of research from 1976 to 1978 and president from 1981 to 1982. He helped found the AAA Doctoral Consortium.

He became professor emeritus in 2007 and later taught for ten years as an adjunct professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Dyckman and his wife, Ann, raised four children, Daniel, James, Linda and David. After his retirement from Cornell the couple settled in Naples, Florida. His family remembered him as an avid runner who completed the Boston Marathon and loved running on the beach and swimming in the ocean. For many years the family gathered for two weeks each summer at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. His obituary described a man of the highest integrity who prized hard work and education.

Colleagues credited Dyckman with seminal work in three areas that still shape accounting scholarship: behavioral and experimental research, capital markets research and analytical managerial research. Former Johnson School dean L. Joseph Thomas called him a model faculty member who was an outstanding researcher, teacher and leader. Since 2018 Cornell has given MBA students the annual Thomas R. Dyckman Accounting Excellence Award in his name, and he remains the 84th member of the Accounting Hall of Fame.