Talvez não fosse OT, porque afinal a primeira publicação do Leopoldo foi
sobre álgebras de Boole, uma espécie de recíproca do teorema de Morse. Mas
li há pouco esse speech de Ralph Raimi, no serviço em memória de Leopoldo,
em Rochester. Me emocionou; e o posto aqui.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(This speech was given by me at Leopoldo Nachbin's Memorial Service, at
the University of Rochester chapel on May 12, 1993. Copies were sent to
Leonard Gillman, Meyer Jerison and Paul Halmos, at their request. Later,
about 1995, I sent a copy to one of Nachbin’s friends in Brazil, for
inclusion in a little book he was publishing, mostly in Portugese, of
memorials of this sort plus a brief biography of Leopoldo -- Ralph A. Raimi,
May 9, 2005)
Leopoldo Nachbin, 1922-1993
"Not many mathematicians can claim to be the best mathematician
within a thousand miles, but for many years Nachbin has been just that." This
was written in 1962 by Paul Halmos. Halmos was a professor in Chicago at
that time, and Leopoldo in Rio, and the letter containing these words was
being sent to Leonard Gillman in Rochester. Gillman, who was Chairman of
our department here at that time, needed some ammunition for the Dean who
would have to approve the appointment that he was contemplating, so he got
a letter from André Weil, too. Weil, who was not famous for praising other
people, opened his letter with the following words, "Well, lets just say
that he is a brilliant mathematician..."
I will not attempt to improve on the Chicago opinions, or to
re-emphasize Nachbin's contributions to mathematics in the thirty years
since they were written; there must be hundreds more qualified than I am to
go on in this vein. Furthermore, it was not only as a mathematician that I
knew Leopoldo, though that was where it began: When I was writing my
thesis, in 1952 or 1953, I studied his 1950 paper on a theorem of the
Hahn-Banach type for linear transformations, but it was not until he came
here to join us that I realized how young he had been when in 1950 he was
already well-known, and not only in Chicago -- and I, two years younger, was
still a student.
It was characteristic of Leopoldo's career that he should be the
subject of letters from Chicago to Rochester concerning events in Rio. The
letters represented something even more cosmopolitan than they appear: Halmos,
the author of the first of these estimates, came originally from Hungary,
and Weil was as French as can be imagined. And Nachbin himself was not
actually *in* Rio when the letters were written; he was a visiting professor
in Paris.
It is true that the mathematical community is world-wide, but even
among scholars Nachbin was particularly international. He was constantly on
the road somewhere, on his way to or from or between visiting
professorships or invited lectures; and he would fire off his
multiple-warhead missives from the most remote places. Everybody got mail
from him, usually a postcard featuring pictures of girls on a beach
somewhere (though the ones from his own beach in Rio were the best). His
international conspiracies were legendary. He created Institutes and
governed them. He edited a series of books in Brazil, but inveigled
professors he knew from all over, including Rochester, to write monographs
for it. When I made a small speech at a diploma ceremony here, about "What
good is mathematics?" or some such thing, to parents of our graduating
class, the first thing I knew I was revising it for a little journal in
Brazil called "Ciência e Cultura," where in due course it was printed. Why?
Because Nachbin asked; you couldn't resist him.
Leopoldo brought graduate students from South America -- and not
only from Brazil -- to Rochester; he brought former graduate students here
as visiting professors. He got financing somehow to bring some of our
Rochester students to Rio for a while, for he did spend a semester of most
years in Rio. One of his many doctoral students here was Soo Bong Chae,
whom we called the Korean Cannonball for his general enthusiasm, including
an enthusiastic use of an imperfect (though daily improving)
English. Nachbin
took him to Rio for a year, and we heard within a few months that he was
giving seminars there in an equally enthusiastic brand of Portugese. (Soo
Bong is now a professor in Florida.)
Leopoldo remembered everyone, and on each of his travels he must
have sent dozens of cards of greeting, as if to gather the world together
with these threads of communication. Threads of gossamer, perhaps, with
nothing in the way of tensile strength; but unbreakable and unforgettable
in their spiritual strength. They said very little, these cards, but they
were gentle as Leopoldo himself was gentle, they were kind as he was kind,
and they were part of the social fabric of our trade, the structure that
contains all mathematicians and not just the handful of specialists that
each of us is naturally linked to in our working life.
One time my wife Sonya and I were visiting Spain, just as
tourists, and we went to Santiago de Compostella, that famous pilgrimage
town in the most remote northwest corner of Spain, on the way to nowhere. On
the afternoon that Sonya went looking at things of little interest to me I
walked over to the local university; it wasn't far away. Nothing was far
away in that town. I had never heard of the university either, at
Santiago, but it has been my custom when traveling to look in on the local
math department if there is one, and talk to whoever possessed a language we
could both talk in. This time they conducted me to the Chairman of their
mathematical institute, or perhaps institute of analysis, a man named
Isidro. "Rochester?" he said, "Then you must know Nachbin." From there we
went on to other matters, but it was the name Nachbin that was my passport.
When I left, Isidro asked me with a smile if I thought I could get him an
invitation to Rochester, so he could be a sort of graduate student for a
year, to study with Nachbin. He was half serious.
Nachbin's cosmopolitanism was not only generated by the life of
mathematics; it was part of his actual heritage. Not until I had known
Leopoldo for ten or fifteen years did I find out about his father, and if I
had not myself had a father named Jacob -- as Leopoldo did -- I might not
have found this out until even more recently. It happened that my own
father came to Rochester on a visit, and I took him to Strong Auditorium
here to see a concert or play by a student group. I saw Leopoldo in the
audience, alone, and we came to sit with him; and in speaking to my father
Jacob, an immigrant from Poland, he told us of his father Jacob Nachbin,
equally an immigrant from Poland (though to Brazil), also in the early years
of this century. I -- and my father -- learned that Jacob Nachbin had
founded and edited the first Yiddish language newspaper in Rio. I
discovered later that Jacob Nachbin was a scholar too, and a writer, and a
man who corresponded in many languages with people in many countries. It
turns out that there is even a book about Jacob Nachbin, a biography
written by a certain Professor Falbel in Sao Paolo, which Leopoldo just two
years ago asked the author to send me. I couldn't read very much of it, for
it was mainly in Portugese, but I did learn that Jacob Nachbin, as a
journalist, went to Spain in 1936 to cover the civil war, and disappeared
without a trace.
Leopoldo was of high school age at that time. I asked him how the
family managed; he merely said it was very hard, his mother worked very
hard. Yet Leopoldo managed to get to the university in Rio and become a
mathematician, publishing research papers by the time he was 20, maybe
younger.
But as I have said, it was only partly as a mathematician that I
knew Leopoldo. Another part was as a sort of editor. In his early days
Leopoldo wrote mainly in Portugese and French, but once he came to Rochester
he wrote almost entirely in English. Anyone who knew him knows how
charming his English was in daily conversation, but he himself worried
about it and wanted his papers and books to sound properly idiomatic in
English. Many times he brought me a manuscript, asking me to correct what
was not correct.
Let me assure you that everything he wrote was in fact correct,
and without possibility of misunderstanding; but that was not enough for
him. He wanted it to *sound* like English, as if a native were writing it.
So I corrected a few things here and there, and explained to him the
arbitrary bits of diction that idiomatic writing would demand, but this was
under protest. He sounded much better in his own English, which had a
spirit that neither I nor any other person born to the language would ever
think of. And sometimes I cheated, and deliberately let pass some
curiosity of his own devising that I considered an improvement over the
style to which he said he aspired.
He wrote better than he was willing to believe, and in my own
memory I would count that the mark of the man, both as mathematician and as
friend: modest, friendly, and forever looking to make something a little
bit more clear, even when he himself had already rendered it as clear and as
sweet as anyone in his audience could ask.
Ralph A. Raimi
10 May 1993
_______________________________________________
Logica-l mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.dimap.ufrn.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/logica-l
