Reminiscence
Jul. 22nd, 2005 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI mentioned that I'm rereading a textbook from one of my undergraduate classes. There's a bit of a story behind that.
I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara from 1975 to 1978. My first year, I took a year-long course in linear algebra from Professor Ky Fan. Dr. Fan was Taiwanese, a short man - maybe a little taller than me, maybe not - with close-cropped steel-gray hair. He was built like a wrestler. (My mental image of Ky Tung, from the Vorkosigan books, is largely based on Dr. Fan; the coincidences of ethnicity and name are only a small part of that.) He was an enthusiastic teacher, and I enjoyed the class. Unfortunately, it met at 1:30. I've always had a problem with early afternoon classes; no matter how interesting the subject, I have difficulty staying awake. In this case, I would struggle with sleep for the first half hour before snapping awake at about 2:00. At any rate, on one occasion I was losing the fight when Dr. Fan suddenly appeared (unseen by me, of course) directly in front of me.
MR _____, YOU ARE SLEEPING! WHY CAN YOU NOT KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN?
What? I'm awake! I'm awake! I'm not sure I'll ever sleep again, actually...
I did better after that.
If you want a one-word description of Dr. Fan's personality, he was feisty. The following story is strictly hearsay; I was not there, and I'm not sure I believe it. The fact that it was told, though, is indicative.
Dr. Fan owned some land in the hills north of Santa Barbara, and occasionally took some of his graduate students up to ramble on his spread. Now, he hated rattlesnakes, and so, on these hikes, he carried a Weapon. It was a longish wooden pole, with a knife blade set at an angle into one end. When he saw a snake, out came the Weapon, and whish! Chop! Off with its head! Well, the story goes that on one occasion he and his students came upon a snake, and he had forgotten the Weapon. His students had to physically restrain him from attacking it with his bare hands.
I don't know whether that happened. I can attest, though, that he drove like a maniac - and that he had removed the seatbelts from his car...
As far as I could tell, his graduate students worshipped him. They called themselves the Fan Club, and even had T-shirts displaying his beaming face, surrounded by the words "Every Minute of the Day!" (That was one of his watchwords, aimed at students he considered insufficiently diligent. "You must do mathematics every minute of the day!")
He was certainly one of my favorite teachers. He wasn't my mentor; Max Weiss and, to a lesser extent, Paul Halmos played that role. But I enjoyed his classes and I liked him, and I think he liked me too.
In spring of 1977, I was planning my courses for my final year. As far as mathematics goes, I was ready for grad school, but I hadn't piled up enough hours yet. So, I settled on three year-long graduate-level courses. Two of them were fairly standard - real and complex analysis, and abstract algebra - but the third... The third was a course in the theory of topological groups, taught by Dr. Fan. Group theory is one of the major branches of abstract algebra; this course, therefore, was a hybrid of algebra with topology. There was also, I was to discover, a healthy dose of analysis, so all three major divisions of math were involved. I've always felt that it's in the borderlands that the most interesting math is to be found, so I was eager to take the course. I discussed it with Dr. Fan; he told me that I was probably already strong enough in group theory, but that I needed to work on topology first, especially point-set topology. He gave me some reading materials, and told me that if I studied them over the summer I'd be ready for the course. So I did. It was not easy; the kind of thinking necessary in point-set topology has a distinctly different flavor from that in algebra, and I struggled with it, but by fall I was ready.
The textbook for the course was volume one of Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Hewitt and Ross. A good part of the class, then, was a generalization of ideas from garden-variety harmonic analysis - Fourier analysis, trigonometric series, stuff like that. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no knowledge of that field. I did well enough in the class, but I must have missed quite a bit of background.
I still don't know much about harmonic analysis, but at least I know what it is, and some of the fundamental ideas. So, a week or so ago, my eye fell on the old textbook, and I began to wonder just what I'd missed out on; I decided to find out.
And that's why I'm rereading a textbook I studied from more than a quarter century ago.
Here's to you, Dr. Fan, wherever you are!
I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara from 1975 to 1978. My first year, I took a year-long course in linear algebra from Professor Ky Fan. Dr. Fan was Taiwanese, a short man - maybe a little taller than me, maybe not - with close-cropped steel-gray hair. He was built like a wrestler. (My mental image of Ky Tung, from the Vorkosigan books, is largely based on Dr. Fan; the coincidences of ethnicity and name are only a small part of that.) He was an enthusiastic teacher, and I enjoyed the class. Unfortunately, it met at 1:30. I've always had a problem with early afternoon classes; no matter how interesting the subject, I have difficulty staying awake. In this case, I would struggle with sleep for the first half hour before snapping awake at about 2:00. At any rate, on one occasion I was losing the fight when Dr. Fan suddenly appeared (unseen by me, of course) directly in front of me.
MR _____, YOU ARE SLEEPING! WHY CAN YOU NOT KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN?
What? I'm awake! I'm awake! I'm not sure I'll ever sleep again, actually...
I did better after that.
If you want a one-word description of Dr. Fan's personality, he was feisty. The following story is strictly hearsay; I was not there, and I'm not sure I believe it. The fact that it was told, though, is indicative.
Dr. Fan owned some land in the hills north of Santa Barbara, and occasionally took some of his graduate students up to ramble on his spread. Now, he hated rattlesnakes, and so, on these hikes, he carried a Weapon. It was a longish wooden pole, with a knife blade set at an angle into one end. When he saw a snake, out came the Weapon, and whish! Chop! Off with its head! Well, the story goes that on one occasion he and his students came upon a snake, and he had forgotten the Weapon. His students had to physically restrain him from attacking it with his bare hands.
I don't know whether that happened. I can attest, though, that he drove like a maniac - and that he had removed the seatbelts from his car...
As far as I could tell, his graduate students worshipped him. They called themselves the Fan Club, and even had T-shirts displaying his beaming face, surrounded by the words "Every Minute of the Day!" (That was one of his watchwords, aimed at students he considered insufficiently diligent. "You must do mathematics every minute of the day!")
He was certainly one of my favorite teachers. He wasn't my mentor; Max Weiss and, to a lesser extent, Paul Halmos played that role. But I enjoyed his classes and I liked him, and I think he liked me too.
In spring of 1977, I was planning my courses for my final year. As far as mathematics goes, I was ready for grad school, but I hadn't piled up enough hours yet. So, I settled on three year-long graduate-level courses. Two of them were fairly standard - real and complex analysis, and abstract algebra - but the third... The third was a course in the theory of topological groups, taught by Dr. Fan. Group theory is one of the major branches of abstract algebra; this course, therefore, was a hybrid of algebra with topology. There was also, I was to discover, a healthy dose of analysis, so all three major divisions of math were involved. I've always felt that it's in the borderlands that the most interesting math is to be found, so I was eager to take the course. I discussed it with Dr. Fan; he told me that I was probably already strong enough in group theory, but that I needed to work on topology first, especially point-set topology. He gave me some reading materials, and told me that if I studied them over the summer I'd be ready for the course. So I did. It was not easy; the kind of thinking necessary in point-set topology has a distinctly different flavor from that in algebra, and I struggled with it, but by fall I was ready.
The textbook for the course was volume one of Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Hewitt and Ross. A good part of the class, then, was a generalization of ideas from garden-variety harmonic analysis - Fourier analysis, trigonometric series, stuff like that. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no knowledge of that field. I did well enough in the class, but I must have missed quite a bit of background.
I still don't know much about harmonic analysis, but at least I know what it is, and some of the fundamental ideas. So, a week or so ago, my eye fell on the old textbook, and I began to wonder just what I'd missed out on; I decided to find out.
And that's why I'm rereading a textbook I studied from more than a quarter century ago.
Here's to you, Dr. Fan, wherever you are!
