Born: 04/16/1938
Troy, New York
Died: 10/17/2026
South Burlington
Details of service:
Lewis Meredith Holmes lived an engaged life as both a scientist and a humanist, with respect for the mind, the earth and the many people with whom he shared his life. He worked professionally in research, editing and teaching in Europe and the United States.
Lewis was born on April 16, 1938, in Troy, New York to Lynn C. and Caroline Kosegarten Holmes and grew up in Fairport, a suburb of Rochester, with older brothers Paul and Lawrence. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1960.
He married Madelyn Jamison in 1970 and together with their beloved daughter, Amanda, lived an international life starting in New Jersey, then moving to Copenhagen, Zurich, Norwich and Stevenage in England, Belmont and Acton in the Boston area and Washington D.C. They retired to Burlington, where Lewis took up an interest in gardening, and also lived part-time in an apartment in Montreal, enjoying the city’s international culture.
Lewis earned a Ph.D. degree in condensed-matter physics from Harvard University and a master’s degree in European literature from the University of East Anglia in England. He conducted research at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and at universities in Denmark and Switzerland. Later he served as Editor-in-Chief of the trade publication Laser Focus World and as Editor of the American Institute of Physics journal Computers in Physics. He published over forty research papers and many magazine articles, as well as four books
His intellectual and cultural interests were wide-ranging. He became fluent in German and started a small publishing company, CEK Publishing, named after his mother Caroline Elizabeth Kosegarten, who was of German heritage. In retirement he wrote three books on the life and works of Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, an eighteenth-century German poet, and was an independent scholar in the German department at the University of Vermont. He became interested in music history while researching the musical settings of Kosegarten’s poems.
In addition to a lifelong fondness for Western classical music, while teaching English in China, Lewis learned to play the sheng, a three-thousand-year-old musical instrument. Afterwards he wrote The Mystery of Music: An Exploration Centered on the Lives of Thirty Ancient Musicians.
He is survived by his wife Madelyn, daughter Amanda, her husband Nicolas Gulino, grandchildren, Nathaniel and Caroline; brother-in-law, Andrew Jamison and nieces Emily and Klara and their children; and niece and nephews of deceased brother Lawrence Holmes: Jeffrey, Brian, Douglas, Steven, and Laura Binetti.
He passed away peacefully at the Residence at Quarry Hill with his wife and daughter at his bedside.
