May 6, 1973—Nov. 29, 2009

NORTH TONAWANDA— After a rare immunological disease ended her promise as a mathematician at age 22, Millie Niss turned to another love— creative writing and poetry— and to mental health advocacy.

By 2002, her worsening health left her unable to go to a workplace, so she took up computer programming and created multimedia Web installations— things that could be done from home. The following year, she went to England to lead a seminar on creating digital sound poetry, and soon after lectured on her work at the University at Buffalo.

Next, in partnership with her mother, Dr. Martha Deed, she developed text, videos, multimedia installations and ultimately a microblog that received mention in an electronic literature collection, an Internet art site and scholarly papers on the history and creation of digital art.

But her fertile mind could not save Ms. Niss’ failing body. She died Sunday at age 36 in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, Amherst, as a consequence of Behcet’s disease and its complications, including the swine flu virus, which she had contracted four weeks earlier.

Born in New York City, she began school in Paris at 2 before returning to Manhattan. In 1981, she moved with her mother to Western New York, where she entered UB’s math program for gifted children at age 8 and graduated from Williamsville North High School in 1989. She completed the math and physics program at Lycee Pierre D’Ailly in Compiegne, France, the following year.

As a Columbia University freshman, she was singled out for the Alice Shafer Prize, awarded to a promising young student by the Association of Women in Mathematics. She was later named Rabi Scholar in Math at Columbia and attended National Science Foundation summer programs in computational algebraic geometry.

Suffering by then from the early stages of Behcet’s, she accepted a graduate fellowship in mathematics at Brown University but after two years had to withdraw because of the illness.

Meanwhile, Ms. Niss, whose story, “A Tale,” had been published by the New York Times when she was 8, and whose scathing review of the 1984 movie “Irreconcilable Differences,” appeared in The Buffalo News, began writing and publishing poems, fiction and newspaper features. While completing half of the requirements for a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston’s Emerson College, she became a mental health advocate.

By 2000, when she was no longer able to work outside her North Tonawanda home, she had become proficient in computer work. She created a Web site, Sporkworld, that year, and, in 2007, a companion microblog journal that she maintained with her mother’s help.

“Although it frustrated her to spend time in bed with a sickness no one yet could name, at least she could create work when she felt up to it, and she began receiving considerable recognition both for her poetry and her web installations,” her mother said.

Ms. Niss was invited to create a cover for a United Nations journal, exhibited graphics at an annual Harvard University art exhibit and wrote poems regularly featured in The Buffalo News, Artvoice and in online journals. She was a featured reader at the Screening Room and several Just Buffalo Literary Center venues.

As she and her mother developed their computer collaboration, they “played off each other” to create videos that were exhibited at a New York City exhibition and explored in the Iowa Web Review and other publications, recalled her mother, a retired psychotherapist and widely published author.

Surviving, besides her mother, are her father, James; her stepfather, David Suckow; three stepbrothers, Kevin, Jay and Kyle; and two stepsisters, Jill Lizak and Kelly Walter.

A memorial service will be at 2 p. m. Saturday in First United Methodist Church, 65 Main St.

—Tom Buckham