Not long ago, my brother Alan and I went to my father’s office at UCLA to decide if a Danish sofa that had been there since 1970 was worth saving and to see how much stuff still needed to be cleared out. After 60 years UCLA finally wanted the office back and Dad, who has late-stage Parkinson’s disease, isn’t using it any more. The office was pretty empty. UCLA Archives had hung notes on a shelf and a drawer saying their review was complete. Whatever remained could be tossed. The bottom shelf of one bookcase was packed with decaying binders of Dad’s lecture notes and class material. Other shelves held stacks of manuscript reprints and folders full of mathematical musings. My father’s distinctive writing – confident, slightly slanted script and equations written in bold, black fountain pen – was evident everywhere.

I made a small stack of Dad’s work to bring home. Starting with his dissertation, each piece a mystery.

1. “Representations of AW* Algebras.” 1955, his Ph.D. dissertation at Yale.
2. “Order and Commutativity in Banach Algebras,” 1958.
3. “Algorithms for Determination of the Polynomial of Best Minimax Approximation to a Function Defined on a Finite Point Set.*” 1959.
4. “n-Parameter Families and Best Approximation,” 1959.
5. “The Wedderburn Decomposition of Commutative Banach Algebras,” 1960.
6. “Derivations of Commutative Banach Algebras,” 1961.
7. “Convergence of Approximating Polynomials,” 1962.
8. “Divergence of Approximating Polynomials,”1963.
9. “The Degrees of Approximation by Positive Convolution Operators,”1965.
10. “Embedding Theorems for Commutative Banach Algebras,” 1966.
11. “Automatic Continuity in Algebras of Differentiable Functions,” 1976.
12. “Divisible Subspace and Problems of Automatic Continuity,” 1980.
13. “Radical Banach Algebras and Automatic Continuity,”1981.
14. “Amenability and Weak Amenability for Beurling and Lipschitz Algebras,” 1986.
15. “Amenability, Weak Amenability and the Close Homomorphism Property for Commutative Banach Algebras.”
16. “Raising Bounded Groups and Splitting of Radical Extensions of Commutative Banach Algebras,” 2000.

There were many more. I finally found one I thought I could understand:

17. “Math through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Others. A book review.” By PCC Jr., American Mathematical Society, 2004.

Many of the papers began with words I’d heard my father utter a hundred times. Words whose cadence was familiar and comforting and whose meaning unfathomable, like the Italian operas that lulled us to sleep every night from his high-fidelity, reel-to-reel, stereophonic tapes.

“Let f(X) be…”
“Given a function f(X) defined on a finite point…”
“Let X be a compact set in the complex plane C…”
“Let f be continuous and periodic on the interval…”

Alan and I sat in Dad’s office – me in the desk chair, Alan sunk into the broken springs of the old Danish sofa – and talked about what this all meant, about who Dad was. What is the brain like of someone who spends his life at this level of abstraction, thinking about things maybe a handful of other people on earth understand, communicating in a technical, precise language known only to those who devote years to deciphering its symbols and syntax?

I can imagine what is happening inside the mind of a writer hunched over a computer. I understand the mental effort required to construct a particularly clear or poetic or descriptive or evocative sentence. What does it feel like to think thoughts like this?

“Assuming U ≠C(Ω) the proof proceeds by defining Y=L^2 (dμ1) where μ ϵ (Ω)and μ⊥u,μ ≠0. If X=L^(2 ) closure of u in Y, then the homological algebra consequences of amenability yield that there exists a projection of P of Y onto X satisfying P(fy) = f P(y), f ϵ U,y∈Y).”*

When we returned home, my uncle, Myron, told the story of why he’d given up mathematics and switched to computing. In the early 1960’s Myron took a graduate math class at UCLA. My father (his brother) was the instructor. Dad had assigned a particularly difficult problem. Weeks went by and no one in the class could solve it. One day Myron decided to take it on. He did nothing else for an entire week. Myron thought about the problem while he was awake, asleep, during meals, while caring for his kids, driving to work, playing squash, all the time. By the end of the week he had an epiphany and solved it. The moment he turned in the completed problem to my father, Myron said, he knew he’d had enough. He was exhausted. He did not want to spend his life at that level of intense contemplation, solving problems of pure, glittering abstraction.

That is what my father spent his life doing.

And yet Dad was so normal. He wasn’t good at small talk or asking you about your feelings, but he was sociable, friendly, a facilitator and an organizer. Dad created adventures, had intense interests and didn’t allow minor things like one professor’s salary and five kids limit his ability to travel or experience the finer things in life. He made economy into a virtue and having high-end experiences on a dime into an intellectual challenge. For Dad, ingenuity mattered a lot. He admired smart adventurers and explorers. He appreciated fine music, food and wine. He loved to travel, to hike and to ski. He loves my mother. He is still tenacious. He now spends a lot of time in his own mind riding through the memories and thoughts of a fantastic life.

*For any mathematicians reading this, sorry for the mistakes. It’s the first time I’ve ever ventured into the “insert equation” function of Word and, frankly, I’m not sure what some of the symbols are.