 |
|||
|
|
Barry
Simon's 60th Birthday Celebration:
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
The lawnmower
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
In the early eighties, Murph Goldberger was the president of Caltech. Murph was a great fan of Barry since their Princeton days and concocted a scheme to try and lure Barry from Princeton to Caltech. The scheme started innocently enough by inviting Barry to spend a year in sunny California as a Fairchild Scholar. Murph's plan indeed worked like charm and a year of leave turned out to be a permanent move. Princeton, at the time, was the Mecca of mathematical physics. It probably had the largest math physics group. Caltech, at the time, and as far as mathematical physics was concerned, was like the rest of Saudi Arabia: a desert (with a lot of oil). As you probably know, Barry thrives in company. So he looked for someone to accompany him to the desert. After a lot of fruitless searching, Barry must have remembered that I had some practical experience living in a real desert and asked me to join him. The arrangement was curious. I must have been the only Princeton Assistant Professor who had his paycheck sent to California. And, I remember that the bank teller once asked me if I could swing such a trick for her. She preferred the Bahamas, however. Anyway, since I had no official standing at Caltech, I decided to decorate myself as the Fairbaby Scholar. The Fairkid year we spent together was a remarkable year, for I had Barry almost all to myself. In Princeton, where I first met Barry as his postdoc, I would get as an appointment the walks to the parking lot, and occasionally a ride to Edison spending a pleasant Shabat with Barry and Martha. How much leisure we had in this Fairkid year is evidenced by the fact that, hold on to your chairs, Barry and I used to go swimming regularly at lunch time at the Caltech swimming pool! Can you imagine how many papers did not get written because of my bad influence on Barry! Swimming at the Caltech pool was very good for me: Here was a place where I could beat Barry fair and square. Barry, on the other hand, felt very guilty about this waste of time. To comfort himself he told me that the lost hours at the pool would be paid up by gained years in better health. Well, what could be more appropriate than to celebrate this wisdom twenty years later, at his 60th anniversary party. Let me now tell you a story involving Ira Herbst and Barry. I was an overwhelmed Wigner fellow at Princeton, working with Ira and Barry and we were quite close. Ira came back startled from one job interview, I forgot where. The chairman had asked him if he ever wrote a wrong paper. Ira was shocked and said "Of course not!" The reaction of the chairman was unexpected. He said: "Then you do not write enough." Now, nobody could ever accuse Barry of not writing enough. But I take the credit for writing a wrong paper with Barry. Here is how this came to be: There was a lot of excitement in Caltech when Voyager first sent those spectacular pictures of the rings of Saturn. I had learnt that Saturn appears to have infinitely many rings from a math grad student at Caltech. Barry and I were working at the time on almost-periodic Schrödinger equations and were fascinated with fractal spectra. I knew about Hill lunar theory and Barry had just written a review of Arnold's book on Mechanics. This led us to make a theory where the near incommensuration of the periods of the moon of Saturn (and also involved the Sun) gave rise to rings with fractal structure. Peter Goldreich, the czar of planetary physics in Caltech, did not like the theory because it was linear stability. But Feynman did because it was simple. The theory could not account for the order of magnitude for the observed gaps and so turned out to be wrong. Barry's time axis is divided into AC and BC: Before Caltech and After Caltech. In the BC era Barry had difficulties deciding if his heart lay with constructive field theory, statistical mechanics or quantum mechanics. In the AC period the die was cast in favor of quantum mechanics and spectral theory. Barry also contracted a chronic strain of PC flu. Since I am an old-timer let me reminisce about the prehistoric BC era. At Princeton there were the lunch time seminars and the Math-Phys seminars. In the lunch time seminar, Barry was the prima ballerina. (Can you imagine Barry on his tiptoes?) He would normally either tell a new result of his or a new result of someone else. With Dyson, Lieb and Wightman in the audience, most grad students and postdocs, were too terrified to expose their slowness if they were to ask an innocent question. Most of the time, nobody dared open his mouth. The notable exception was the fresh grad student from Harvard, Alan Sokal, who never had a fear of authority and was sufficiently smart and self-confident to argue with Barry. The math phys seminars were a different business. There was an outside speaker most of the time. Wigner would usually show up and ask his typical Wignerian questions. Barry would sit in the audience and write a paper. From time to time he would look up from his notes and ask a question that would unsettle most speakers: Someone in the audience seemed to know more about what he was talking about than himself. Sometimes, at the end of the talk, Barry would go to the board and give his version of the proof, which was always slick. Barry, you are now 60. Most of us probably do not enjoy being reminded about our advanced age, but I think that one of the nice things about you, Barry, is your optimism. You probably, enjoy being 60! I wish you fun with math and good health in the next sixty years.
|
||
|
|
Congratulations to Barry on his 60th birthday -- as a college classmate I am over-whelmed but not surprised by his many accomplishments. Here is a little story you might like: As undergraduates at Harvard, several of us took the Real Variables course given by Professor Lynn H. Loomis. Loomis came to class with few or no notes and lectured fluently. One day he was writing a proof on the blackboard and paused briefly, scratching his head. He stepped back from the board and looked into the audience where he saw Barry. Loomis said "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" and Barry said "Yes." Loomis said "I thought so" and then went back and completed the proof. The rest of us had no idea what this thought was, since it was not verbalized by either of them! This incident was one of many that convinced us that Barry was uniquely gifted in such matters. It was a privilege to attend college with this extraordinarily brilliant man who also has a great sense of humor and has proved a wise and guiding mentor over the years.
|
||
|
Grigori Rozenblum |
Dear Barry:
|
||
|
E. Brian Davies |
In 1983 Derek
Robinson invited me to visit him at the Mathematical Institute in
Canberra for a month. As one of the inducements he mentioned that he had
also invited Barry Simon for the same period. The prospect of seeing
Barry, Derek and kangaroos was enough to make my decision, and in July
1983 I set off on the gruelling journey.
|
||
|
|
Barry and friends in the
French Alps, near Geneva. It was a hike to Pt. de
Miribel on April 8, 1973. |
||
|
Charles Fefferman |
I have a cute Barry quote from a visit to Princeton in the late 80's or early
90's:
"To first approximation, the human brain is a harmonic oscillator." He made this remark in private conversation as we walked around the Princeton campus.
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I first met Barry(-boy) in front of the conference building of the Les Houches summer school, back in 1970. He introduced himself like this: "Hi, I'm Barry Simon from Princeton University." I must have replied roughly as follows: "Good afternoon, Professor Simon. I guess I am Juerg Froehlich, a student from ETH in Zurich. How are you?" This was to be the beginning of a wonderful friendship that has lasted to this day. In the summer of 1970, I
had just started my graduate studies as a student of Klaus Hepp, who was
one of the lecturers at that school. (Of course, Klaus arrived at Les
Houches late and left early, as he does at every conference. After his
departure, Konrad Osterwalder and I were confronted with the task of
proofreading and editing his lecture notes – quite a formidable task).
Barry, however, who is only a few months older than I am, was already on
his way towards becoming a faculty member at Princeton. He would always beat me in
everything! He got married before I did; he has more children than I do;
he started to play with computers before I did (if I ever will); he quit
physics and became a mathematician before I did (if I ever will), etc... Barry was almost always writing some manuscripts, even during lectures. Nevertheless he appeared to always understand what was being taught to us. In the library, a new Simon preprint could be found every week – the school lasted for eight weeks. These preprints were handwritten. Some of them were co-productions with people like Graffi, Grecchi (Borel summability of the anharmonic oscillator), or the late Raphael Hoegh-Krohn (hypercontractivity). These preprints were consumed like French croissants by the other kids (like myself), because they were very clearly written and not enormously technical and could therefore be understood by people whose level was not terribly advanced yet. David Ruelle presented
some rather qualitative lectures about statistical mechanics. (He likes
to be qualitative and write only few formulae, in his lectures.) Barry
asked him: "David, when are you going to start to do some serious work?"
David replied: "Go to the library and read my paper about superstable
potentials. This is as serious as I can get." I imagine that the
contents of that paper will appear in Barry's second book on statistical
mechanics that we are all awaiting impatiently. I later learnt from
Elliott Lieb that when he and Barry were working on Thomas-Fermi, during
a stay at IHES near Paris, Barry not only discovered lots of lemmas, but
he also discovered that Swiss pralines are kosher. I had to learn many things – I still do. For example, I had to learn that when I would say "hello" to Barry in a corridor of Jadwin Hall, in the morning, and he would not even turn his head towards me, it did not mean that he was angry at me; it just meant that he didn't have even five seconds to lose. (Well, I guess those Brooklyn kids do not have those terribly refined manners.) But Barry had wonderful qualities of all kinds! For example, he always applied for money from the NSF, not just for himself but also for Valja Bargmann and for me, and probably for further members of the club. And he apparently got the money. He was unbelievably well organized and efficient! He would always write the paper when the research was done, and he did it in five percent of the time ordinary mortals need to write such papers. I once told Barry that I always wanted to be at a department with a colleague like him, who takes care of essentially everything and doesn't forget anything. He said: "Juerg, I only know one place where you could have a colleague like me." (He had already moved to sunny California.) At Princeton, he still wrote his manuscripts during seminars, just to ask the right questions at the end or point out errors. The brown-bag luncheons were by and large "Barry Simon shows" where one could learn about his latest lemmas and theorems – I probably could have learnt functional analysis there if I had stayed at Princeton for a few more years; incidentally not just from Barry, but also from Ed. "Missed opportunities." Then there were those
annual Simon parties at Martha and Barry's house in New Brunswick, with
Barry always occupying the most comfortable chair in the house, and with
all the snacks within his reach.... You know, this could easily evolve
into a one-hundred page novel. I've got to cut it short.
|
||
|
|
Close
interactions with Barry have their great rewards — and perils!
|
||
|
|
Buffon once said,
"The style is the man." I tell only one story
showing the style and humour of Barry. Once in the last millennium, in
Marseille, I was driving a car, accompanied by Barry and others; we were
off to see Jean Bellissard. It was a lazy summer afternoon, and the car
was turning slowly around the Bellissard palace in search of a free
parking space. For a while, the silence was broken only by the
continuous, strident call of the cicadas. I was not aware of having made
a complete tour around the building (and of the vanishing hope of
finding a parking spot) when I heard a clear unequivocal sentence: "two
pi!" |
||
|
|
Below is an amusing little story that shows Barry's good sense of humor and how quickly he could think of a clever comment.
|
||
|
|
• One of the rare categories in which I can compete pretty well with Barry is in the execrableness of our handwriting. I was at MIT as a postdoc when we wrote our long paper on the Stark effect. Back in those days, one actually wrote articles by hand and a secretary, using a device called a "typewriter" turned them into manuscripts, leaving blanks for formulae to be inserted. As a lowly postdoc I didn't get first pick of the secretarial staff, and the manuscript ended up in the hands of a well-intentioned but struggling secretary who would produce about one page per day, which was usually sent back multiple times with corrections, often amusing. One day a favorite adjective of Barry's, "operator-theoretic," came back as "operator neurotic," and I knew the manuscript was taking its toll on her. With lots of encouragement and little gifts she finished the manuscript after months of work, as the term ended. But she didn't return the next term — it was doubtless the last mathematical manuscript she ever typed. • Barry may or may not have
said "This is my
cross to bear" according to Ed Nelson, but might he ever have
been a cross bear? The first time Barry's bearlikeness crossed my mind
was at a party at his home in New Jersey, where even graduate students
were invited, and little Rivka appeared looking for one of her toys. I
think it may have been a stuffed animal, a "big horse" or something like
that. Finding the toy was way beyond the powers of a graduate student,
but Barry walked by in the next room so I sent Rivka in that direction,
telling her "Just follow the big bear, and he'll find your toy." Bears
have acute hearing, and I remember him growling, "I heard that!", but
Rivka didn't hesitate at my description of her father. • Barry has always been remarkable for his vast knowledge of mathematics, so it was many years before I can recall ever telling him a published theorem he didn't already know. One day I saw Barry in Princeton shortly after a meeting and told him about an old inequality for PDEs, which, as I could tell from his intent look, was new to him. I said, "It seems to be useful. Do you want to see the proof?" His response "No, that's OK." Then he went to the board and wrote down a flawless proof on the spot.
|
||
|
|
• Soon after I arrived in Princeton as a postdoc, Barry suggested that we work on proving Borel summability of the perturbation series for the Schwinger functions in two-dimensional \phi^4 quantum field theory. He had an idea which he showed me and after a couple of days I had another idea. But I soon realized that these two ideas were not enough. Up to this time I was a very hard worker but having thought about how ideas percolate up through the subconscious, I decided to relax and let them do just that. WRONG! A couple of weeks later a preprint arrived from Geneva with a proof. • Barry, Yosi Avron and I were working on magnetic fields. As everyone knows Barry is a very fast worker and he writes up his work even faster. Barry and Yosi felt we should write something and as usual I wanted to get more done first. One day the two of them arrived in my office and began trying to convince me again that we should write something up. I protested, at which point Barry took his hand from behind his back and with a smile produced a manuscript which he had presumably written the night before.
|
||
|
|
Here are two pictures
I took at the 1974 International Congress of
Mathematicians in Vancouver.
|
||
|
|
Barry explains Szegö recursion |
||
|
|
I gave a seminar at
Caltech in 1988, I think, on my work with Dreifus on the multiscale
analysis, which we had just finished. The title of the talk was
"Localization without tears". If my memory is correct, Tom Spencer was
visiting Caltech and was at the seminar.
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
Many of you know Barry from his academic work and
community achievements. I have a rather, uh, different perspective. I
had the distinct honor and privilege of co-writing a handful of computer
books with Barry, including several Mother of All Windows books, and The
Mother of All PC Books.
Barry’s one of the most intensely intelligent people I’ve ever met – and delightful, in every sense of the term. Except for the puns. The puns were really, really bad. Hey, Barry! Wanna write another Windows book? NO! Put DOWN that brickbat!
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
In November 2004, a
conference celebrating Ed Saff's 60th Birthday
was held at Georgia Tech. Barry Simon, fresh from establishing the first
Szego-type conditions for orthogonal polynomials since Szego himself,
was a principal invited speaker. On the way to the conference Barry fell
ill, and had to spend most of the conference in an Atlanta Hospital. He
ate the conference dinner in that hospital — but in the last hours of
the conference was able to come to Tech, and to discuss orthogonal
polynomials with remaining delegates, presenting some of his talk too. |
||
|
|
|||
|
Krishna Maddaly |
We were pleased that Barry
attended our workshop on
|
||
|
|
• In the late
1960s, Barry was a graduate student in physics at
Princeton and attended some courses I taught. I soon learned that I did
not need to prepare with great thoroughness; it was enough to get things
approximately right and Barry from where he was sitting would tell us
how to get them precisely right. I miss Barry. •
Shortly after moving to Caltech Barry came east for a visit. He said
that someone had stolen his attaché case. When we asked whether he had
lost anything of importance, he replied, "Only the paper I wrote on the
flight.''
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
In his third year at Caltech, Barry taught a graduate class in group
representations. There were two undergraduates in the class, Zinovy
Reichstein and me. I couldn't get up at 9 am for lectures and Zinovy
took beautiful notes. I typically photocopied Zinovy's notes every week
prior to doing the homework. One week Zinovy had to be away. Forewarned
I showed up in class. Barry walked into class, did a double-take when he
spotted me and announced "It's undergraduate number conservation!'' It
never bothered Barry that I did not come to lectures, even though I was
one of his undergraduate advisees. When I went to graduate school and
expressed some dismay at the less than supportive or encouraging
attitudes of the faculty, he wrote me long encouraging letters. I don't
think I ever understood how someone as busy as he was, with every minute
of his time scheduled, could find the time to write such letters. |
||
|
|
As an undergraduate
I took Quantum Mechanics from Barry, little knowing
that I would later wind up a student. At the same time, I was taking
Functional Analysis from Ira Herbst. The Quantum Mechanics course met on
Tuesdays and Thursdays and there was a break in the middle of the
lecture. One day I had my copy of Methods of Mathematical Physics, Vol.
I, Functional Analysis with me. Barry walked up to me during the break
and broke into a big smile followed by mock indignation when he saw that
I had a copy of Reed-Simon. "Don't read that stuff!" he admonished me.
"It'll pollute your mind! It's worse than comic books!" Long before
Barry became a department chair he was already a master recruiter.
Several years later, I had the good fortune to begin thesis work with
Barry as a graduate student.
|
||
|
|
My first
encounter with Barry Simon was as a TA at Caltech
in fall 1996 when I was a junior. Caltech's core curriculum had just
changed, and this was the first year of the new Math 1. Barry was
teaching Math 1a out of lecture notes he had prepared instead of the
traditional book "Tommy I" (Apostol, Vol. I for those who don't know
Caltech lingo). |
||
|
Grigori Rozenblum |
A funny
typo I saw in a paper by Barry. In Phys. Rev.
Letters, vol. 65, no. 17 (1990), 2185-2188, in the reference to a
paper published in Trans. AMS, the latter society was spelled as Am.
Microsc. Soc.
|
||
|
Beth Ruskai |
After he
moved to Caltech, Barry invited me to spend a month
there, which, I think, ended up as April, 1984. Since e-mail was not yet
widely used, he phoned me in February to arrange times for us to talk
before his schedule filled up.
|
||
|
|
Barry always enjoyed a good (or bad) prank. Jan Segert, Yosi Avron, Barry and I wrote a paper on nonabelian Berry's phase. Since there was already a table of contents, Jan added the abstract: "Yes, but some parts are reasonably concrete". CMP accepted the paper, but insisted on a "serious" abstract. Jan, our corresponding author, complied, but when Barry found out, he was furious. "The abstract is the best part of the paper! Tell them we won't publish the paper without it." I'm not sure if he intervened with CMP, or if he insisted that Jan do so, but the original abstract got published.
|
||
|
Barry Simon |
•
The stories here have reminded me of some of
my own. When Mike Reed and I got the page proofs for Volume 1, we found
some really amazing typos (recall in those days that rather than working
from a submitted TeX file, one sent in a typed manuscript and a
typesetter reentered everything on a fancy machine): the proofs referred
to "the nationalized Planck's constant" and to the "night shift
operator." I recall Mike joking that perhaps the latter had been entered
by the night shift guy who was trying to enter what we'd now call an
Easter Egg. |
||
|
Rick Simon |
I have enjoyed reading all of the Barry stories from his colleagues. Some of you have known Barry for almost 40 years. I know him a little longer – for almost 60 years! Most of you know Barry from his substantial academic achievements. Like Woody Leonhard, I know Barry from a different perspective. I found several pictures of him that I would like to share with all of you, together with a couple of Barry Stories:
• When we were growing up in Brooklyn, we had a cleaning woman who cleaned our apartment once a week. Betty always said that everything Barry knew he learned from his older brother. Oh, how I loved that woman.
• When Barry was a senior in high school, he took a Nation-Wide Math exam sponsored by the Mathematics Association of America and the Society of Actuaries. Believe it or not he got one wrong answer. Well, Barry didn’t believe it either. So he appealed claiming that due to the ambiguous wording of the question that he “missed”, there were actually two possible correct answers. Barry’s appeal was granted and he became the fifth student in the thirteen-year history of the exam to achieve a perfect score. This accomplishment resulted in a feature article entitled: “One Student Plus One Challenge Equals One Perfect Math Score” that appeared on the first page of the second section of the May 2, 1962 edition of The New York Times. The complete article follows:
|
||
|
|
|||
 |
|||
|
The question and choices on which Barry based his
appeal read as follows.
I look forward to meeting many of you at SimonFest 2006. Even though I will not understand a word of the technical presentations, I hope that some of the speakers will do a little roasting…something that Barry well deserves.
The Simon Family: Hy, Minnie, Barry, and Rick (ca 1959)
(ca 1953) (ca 1947) |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Yakov Sinai |
In the mid-1970's, Barry visited Moscow. One day he went into a store to buy some eggs. He handed over a 10 ruble bill to the storekeeper and said "Eggs" in Russian; it was the only word in Russian which he knew. She asked him whether he wanted to spend all 10 rubles (a considerable amount in those days) on eggs. But this was a different phrase which Barry didn't understand, and in reply he just smiled his charming smile. She then gave him a check for a hundred eggs. The following day, Barry gave a seminar at the university. It was his last day since he was leaving Moscow the next day. After his talk, he distributed the eggs among the participants. Following the American tradition, undergrads and graduate students received the largest number of eggs and professors received almost nothing.
|
||
|
site maintained by
SimonFest@caltech.edu |
|||
Barry with Gerry Folland
Barry, Rivka, and Martha
Erwin
has been with me since my first book, pointing out bugs and warning
folks about the unthinkable. He’s a dashing eight-legged refuge from the
1930s. The physicists in the audience will no doubt recall Erwin
Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, who invented a
famous "thought experiment" in which a vial of poison gas might (or
might not) kill a cat. Schrödinger’s cat became justly famous among the
psi-squared crowd. A few years ago, a computer book writer had the
temerity to refer to Schrödinger’s cat in a book submitted to IBM. The
IBM Thought Police wouldn’t put up with such an offensive allusion to a
cuddly animal, so they changed the manuscript, exorcising Schrödinger’s
cat and introducing in his stead Schrödinger’s cockroach, an animal that
could be (presumably) sometimes-dead without offending the more delicate
readers of IBM manuals.
