Correct attribution is hard, especially for the past

As mathematician and golfing visionary Doug Arnold wrote 3:33AM on Jun 10, 2010 (and I have archived the exact email, for the future historians of Google urban myths)

"Correct attribution is hard, especially for the past."

Doug does not do pro sports, I threw in the golfing reference as in US you have to be a sports celeb to gain street cred as a source of quotes. But he is a pro, and we are grateful for him for much other than golfing, see for example this.

Often one reads that Niels Bohr (or even Yogi Berra AKA "I never said the most of the things I said") said that

"It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

Anglo-centered webpages (see, for example, letterfromhere.blogspot.com and larry.denenberg.com) ascribe the quote to everyone and her Anglo-Saxon mother.

W. J. Moore, in Schrödinger, Life and Thought (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989), p. 320 refers to this as an “old Danish proverb” that Bohr was fond of quoting. All Danes, however, know that it was the cartoonist Storm P. who said it first:

»Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden«.

Well, not so. The gist of what follow (to you ignorant of Danish - much is lost here in translation) is that it goes back to 1930's and 1918, and presumably earlier than that. In old fashioned way, a source for the claim is provided: MP in the Danish Parliament during late 1930's. Steincke, K.K., "Farvel og Tak", p. 227. 1948 / Vogel-Jørgensen, T., "Bevingede ord" p. 124 (Gad 1990).

So it was not Storm P. Then it is attributed to Markus M. Ronner (though Anonymous in the comments below says "The quote can't be attributed to Markus Ronner -- he was only born in 1938."), where the track -for the moment- is lost in the fog of Germanic citations.

Which brings us to the general problem of correct attribution. Sir Michael Berry puts it this way:

But one ought to get things in perspective, and so I offer (not entirely seriously) three laws. First, there is the fact that it is hard to achieve justice in the attribution of scientific ideas, and this leads to

Arnold's Law (after the famous Russian mathematician): No discovery is credited to the right person. (Of course this applies to Arnold's Law too.)

The second law says that it is not only hard but impossible to achieve justice, because it seems that one can always find a precursor to any thought. So we have

Berry's Law: Nothing is ever discovered for the first time. (This too is self-referential.)

Here now is the third law, which I offer not because it applies to us (nor do the others, really) but because it is deep. It is a quotation from a philosopher:

Whitehead's Law: To come close to a true theory and to realise its precise application are two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

Danish sources:
LUNDSKOV.DK :: Citater

Ifølge Politiken, Storm P. sagde ikke: »Det er svært at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden«, det er et af de citater, man ikke kender ophavsmanden til.
• Ifølge K.K.Steinckes erindringsbog ”Farvel og Tak”,(s.227, 1948) var det en sprogblomst som faldt i Folketinget 1935-39.
• I T.Vogel-Jørgensens ”Bevingede ord” (Gad, 1990, side 124) oplyses bl.a., at Steincke på forespørgsel har oplyst, at han ikke huskede hvem der havde sagt det.
• Ordsproget omtales også i en den norske ”Bevingede ord”. Her skriver man: ” Det er vanskelig å spå - især om fremtiden, setning som har vært tillagt den da. forf. R. Storm Petersen. Dette er ikke riktig, og opphavet er usikkert. Ifølge den da. politiker K. K. Steincke (1880-1963) i Farvel og Tak, 227 (1948) er den falt i det da. Folketinget i tiden 1935-39, men verken Steincke eller andre har kunnet angi opphavsmannen. ”
• I art. ”9250”, i det norske tidsskrift Samtiden 1918, siger prof. Fredrik Paasche: ”Det er en vanskelig sak å spå om fremtiden.” At Paasche ikke bruker den vanligste formen, eller føyer til ”som bekjent” el.l., tyder på at sentensen er yngre enn 1918.”
• I ”Den store citatbog” af J.B. Holmgård (Reitzels forlag, 2.oplag 1993, s.118), er citatet ”Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden” tilegnet Markus M.Ronner m.fl.

Fight jetlag by not sleeping

SmarterTravel.com says:

Fight jetlag by not sleeping. The secret to fighting jetlag has been discussed by lots of travel experts, but we found the common advice—to stay awake until night falls in your new destination—to be unhelpful. “We have found that a shower and a short nap (no more than 2 hours) after landing is just the trick. Then we head out, enjoy the afternoon and evening, have a good night's sleep and are good-to-go! Check when booking hotels about early check-in, or even pay for the night before, so the room is available as soon as you land. Money well spent!” I’ve tried both methods, and for me, the mythbusters are absolutely right: A short nap and a shower is the perfect remedy to a long, sleepless flight.

The best years of our lives

                                                     Waltham, MA - May 2010

For my niece Maia's Brandeis commencement

we had a family lunch in a nice, spacious Elephant Walk restaurant, wide enough that the whole family sat along one long table. Maia in the middle, and at the far right the grandpa Jerome, his wife and their girlfriend. They were laughing, giggling and having a great time, so I went over to sit with the three of them: 94, 95 and 96.

I was in my 60's so I wanted to know what to expect in the years ahead.

They were emphatic, all three: The absolutely best years of life are the 70's. When you are 70 you are relieved of the hum-drum obligations of adulthood, free to do what you want to do, still full of energy and at the top of your game. The 80's are a bit creaky - many small malfunctions. 

The 90's? Nothing to recommend.

2^6

The Facebook, my Gawd? I've never had so many people remember my birthday. Three screenfulls of gmail inbox scrolling continuously like a screen saver.

Windbag Senior says: "Wait till the senior moments start. (I've been having them for years:2^5.)"

I agree - 32 is such wonderful age. Talkin' bout my generation? As to the symptoms... Constantly running to pee, having bowel movements at oddest times, beautiful girls looking through you as one would look through a train window - you have to admire my courage, [this to Rock'n'roll Dreams, who could not understand why I bother to carry on, already in 1978] to survive all that for so long.

2^6 is a good number, in base 64 it is 10, so I got to blow out one lit candle, and blow out one imagined candle standing for zero. Half of the Indians at the dinner were Jewish, so the cake was Passover cake, made of matzo flour. Really good.

Next day I windbagged my way through two lectures at Tufts. Under the portrait of Norbert Wiener as a 13 year old graduate.

We count our blessings.

Grothendieck has spoken: what now?

This declaration by Alexandre Grothendieck, has been placed on the homepages of the Grothendieck Circle (in French), and Ferment Magazine (in English):

Declaration of my intention to refuse permission to allow my works to be published

I have no intention of publishing, or republishing, any work or text of which I am the author, in any form whatsoever, in electronic or print media, whether it be in the form of entire works or extracts, whether or not they be texts of a scientific or personal character, or any other kind, or in the form of personal letters addressed to others - as well as all translations of texts of which I am the author.

All editions or transmission of such texts which have been produced in the past without my express permission, or shall be made in the future as long as I am alive, which will or has been done in opposition to my will, as it is precisely expressed herein, will be deemed illegitimate in my eyes.

To the degree that I become aware of them, I will insist to the makers of these pirate editions, or any other publications including, without my express permission, texts from my own hand (apart from possible citations of a few lines at most), that they immediately withdraw these works from the marketplace; that the directors of libraries holding copies of my works, that these works be removed at once.

If my intentions as an author, as clearly expressed here, are treated as dead-letter, then let the shame of their contempt for me fall upon the heads of those responsible for those illegitimate editions, and on the directors of the libraries that harbor them. (From the moment that one or the other be informed of my intentions)

Made at my residence January 3, 2010 AG

Google.com/voice: 404 IT STINX

OK, I admit it: I never liked phones. I tried to live without one but having a wife and no phone is not possible. Actually, even before that - I moved into Livjaegergade without phone, but one day Carsten got so annoyed that he ordered one for me. As one fifth of Danes share the same name, and rest the remaining dozen names, they use their profession to distinguish themselves in the phone book. I got "fa." as a suffix, and an irate call from a ladyfrom the phone company to complain that I was misrepresenting myself, as I was no "fabrikant" (factory owner). Took me a while to get her to accept that I was a "fremmed arbejder" (foreigner worker), but she eventually gave up, and "fa." I stayed for next twenty years, with phone numbers everywhere: Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, Atlanta. Urrrgh. But at least I have no cell phone. Yet.

If one calls my google.com/voice number 404 487 8469, any number of phones in US that I set as active ring: home, office, Chicago home, a cell phone, or wherever I happen to be. If none of them answer, google.com/voice records callers message, and sends it to me by email. For example, one can try to pronounce my name, and it shows up in my email:

Whuz-yr-name?

It also transcripts it - and that is hilarious, it does not like any immigrant accents, so far only a lady from GaTech Human Resources got transcripted sensibly. Typical result is more like this:

You-better-brush-up-on-your-Shakespeare

If any phone picks up before google voicemail kicks in, then I do not get
a message - that's why I am trying to disable voicemail on all phones.

Inhuman Resources

I did my best to fill in my p-card (work purchasing credit card) and sign 7000 places, but not once since 2001 has this thing just gone in - always comes back to me multiple times. For example, there is some person in Inhuman Resources who does not like the way I sign these things. So I feel it less traumatic I put these forms in a cubbyhole of one of our administrators who actually does not do these things, but has gentle hands. It will be passed on, and come back to me in a few days.

It's also an occasion for celebration, because I refused to authorize Inhuman Resources to do a criminal check on me, so this is my last p-card, and from now on my attempts to get purchases refunded will take on a still more voluminous paperwork form. I was hoping for something more in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence (Magna Carta, presumption of innocence, stuff like that) when I immigrated to these shores from "them" (the comrades of former communist Yugoslavia).

Gowd, I must be turning Libertarian? It's something they are adding to Virginia-Highlands water.

But having all administration (financial offices, grant office, computer people) turn from supporting us in our work to running interference and policing us is getting increasingly tedious, so I'm getting edgy. This is what happened. First a secretary somewhere embezzled tens of thousands of dollars (our annual budget is 1.2 billion dollars). Then another secretary posted naked pictures of herself using work computer. The level of wrongdoing remains the same. To cite Patrick Jenkins, senior Information Systems Auditor (Whistle, April 2010):

It's important to remember that it's a very small minority involved in questionable activity. [...] The problems we run across are easily 0.01 percent or less of what we look at, overall.

Total 2010 GaTech budget is $1.2B, so we are talking about $120K in questionable spending. School of physics alone has about 4 people using most of their time generating paperwork related to faculty purchases. My wild guess is that we are spending between $1M and $10M to prevent faculty from initiating potentially questionable spending in $100K range. Would it not be much cheaper to assume that the faculty and staff consists of upright citizens, and criminally prosecute the few that stray from the straight path?

Nevertheless - transition took only couple of years - we have been kidnapped by a locust cloud of liability lawyers, who construe the purpose of the Flagship of Technology and Science of Southeast to be preventing people who work here from doing anything that could become a criminal liability for the institution.

In the old time my computer would greet me like this:

--- welcome to "zero", the CNS linux network server ---
--- ubuntu/dapper linux 2.6 2 amd86x64 ---
Now that KBG has taken over, it greets us like this:

This system is for the use of authorized users only. Individuals using this computer system without authority, or in excess of their authority, are subject to having their activities on this system monitored and recorded. Be advised that if such monitoring reveals possible evidence of criminal activity, system personnel may provide the evidence to law enforcement officials.

Well thank you so much. In my innate state of moral turpitude the thought that criminal activity might lead me to law enforcement officials never crossed my mind. Now I'll be doubly vigilant while engaging in it. And while we are at it, can you please hang a sign around the neck of every child entering the campus saying:

Georgia Civil Code Secs. 19-7-5/19-15- 1/49-5-180 and Georgia Criminal Code Secs. § 16-3-20. Parent or person in loco parentis reasonably disciplining of a minor has a justification for a criminal prosecution based on that conduct.

plus rest of the penal code, lest we forget. So now we are recruiting top talent by whispering sweet nothings in their ears while a job offer that reads like incarceration papers is in the mail.

As an added security measure, an unattended computer on my desk locks up every 15 (fifteen) minutes and pops up the above winged greeting. Then you press [ctrl][alt][del] and type in your user ID and your password, and voila! you can continue your criminal activities. Really improves your productivity while keeping you out of the jail. So everybody is lugging their laptops to work, and waiting for the day when a G4 wireless connection will liberate us. Part of our research is already running on John's off-campus server, and I'll have to move the rest as well.

The stupidities our IT Security Organs impose in their very effective work on preventing us from working... For example, CNS network Tzar and I could not [shut down] the Center communal W7 PC, so we had to request the KGB administrator to come, log in as administrator. What goes through IT people's heads I cannot fathom. My instinct is that if you give people a chance, they'll do the right thing. Why would they be doing science otherwise?

I'm writing pointless letters of protest, like to our telephone police. "They" just informed us that from now on they will erase any voice mail older than 30 days. So I'm trying to figure how to move all my voice mail to google.com/voice. They are not technology powerhouse, like us, but they seem to be able to keep voicemail for more than 30 days. If the locust cloud of liability lawyers does this to our emails - and - for added computer security - to all our computer files, the life will become so much simpler again. As secure as the death itself.

Followup: What I wrote above was in the morning. Since then I got this email: "You have turned in your January p-card statement. However, you have not signed it on the cardholder signature line. Please come by the Finance Office as soon as possible to sign your statement."

I'm fairly sure I signed that piece of paper, but not on the right dotted line. The world will collapse and both our departmental Financial Officers and I will be taken away in ball and chains if I do not "come by the Finance Office as soon as possible to sign". But I feel too fragile to attempt such a thing in my present condition.

Nobody said that life here would be a bed of roses.

In the real world such defects could have consequences

My personal playwright, of K. und K. fame:

"The liberation of the laptop. We can work anywhere, any time, so we drift away from our offices, retreating into our own little cyberworlds, while the floors grow quiet as the prairie and the nexus of activity spins apart... Know what I have? A writing board, coffee shops, and a consortium of bastards. Go cry on someone else's shoulder."

"While a physicist's gotta hide, dramatista needs to feel the pulse of humanity and lots of bastards to get adrenaline flowing. Go get them!"

"Oh, I don't have to go get them, it's the theater community, I can't avoid them. On the other hand, knowing so many actors, directors, and, yes, playwrights, has given me an invaluable understanding of narcissism, callowness, superficiality, cravenness, hypocrisy, selfishness, and self-delusion. Fortunately, most of these people don't live in the real world, where such defects could have serious consequences. We are so much more comfortable in the black box than Out There, where the others don't realize how special we are."

"I've had some interest in [my own story] over the years, but that's never led to production. 2010 might be the year, though; I've submitted it to Essential Theater and to Stage Door. However, I've given up trying to figure out how ADs make their decisions. I've moved on."

Do no count citations, impact numbers

This from D. N. Arnold, SIAM NEWS, December 4, 2009 (via my friend Gregor)
Integrity Under Attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing

Pay no heed to silly numbers - just check what journal the good publications that you have read are, publish there. Even that can be gamed and is, in good journals like Physical Review Letters; once you establish a little subfield, with a group of friends citing and refereeing each other, it can have a good run with not very good articles. There is no defense other than common sense.

Incurrable schmaltz

I cannot help it. Instead of doing anything sensible, I fell for this. And this. OK, here are a few movies that I love. They might be pure schmaltz, but I cannot help it - I'm an incurable romantic:

Off the Map
Genghis Blues (a wonderful documentary by my two nephews)
Everything is Illuminated (with lead singer of Punk Bordello as interpreter)
Across the Universe (the baby boomer relapse)
Run Lola, Run (a movie about sensitivity to initial conditions)

For adult couple viewing I recommend any of Sid Nagel's 10 best movies.

You better brush up on your Shakespeare, Google Voice

I cheated - had Nick do the work for me and take picture of Blot. But get a load of this:

William Shakespeare - Sonnet #29,


When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.


as read by Blot

and transcribed by Google Voice:

When in disgrace with Fortune. I'm inside.
I will alluring be, we, my outcast state
and so I will definitely been with my blue skies
and look upon myself in curse my fate
wishing me like 21 more rich in hope.
Featured like a m like, and with friends possessed
design this Mansard and that meant scope
with what I most enjoy content at least
yet in these thoughts myself. Almost. This biting.
Hopefully, I think, on, the, and then my state
like to the market breakup day arising
from selling her things him at heaven's gate

for the i, sweet love. Remember such well Springs
at de nice want to change my state with king.

Yeah, I don't gain own.
We were 42 20 80, savvy it up and walk to do to reach Jandy are not Oktoberfest for feel it'd be air. If you do then.


To be fair, the last four sentences are in Danish, Croatian, French and German, respectively:

Jeg vil gerne ha' en ol.

Large aspect plane Couette turbulence

For an introduction into plane Couette turbulence, see
ChaosBook.org/tutorials

Alexander the Huge

what do you know? At the opening of Gunilla's exhibition (scroll on the right until a picture of two girls appears - then click on next until the big painting of little Alexander shows up) Alexander the Huge was the first paining that got sold.
So much for the theory that nobody buys baby portraits (other than one's own baby's).

Toni faces mortality

I talked to my father. He is a very sprightly 72 year, still running the Central Europe sales of the Danish company he works for, and flying all over the place almost every week. 

He and his wife had moved to Villach on former Austrian/Yugoslav border some eight years ago, both to avoid taxes and to be close to Croatia. So what has he been up to last few weeks? 

He knows an architect that was remodeling some tombs in the pretty 18th century Zagreb cemetery, and the architect found for him a good empty tomb just in the front row by the entrance arcade (with all known Croatian poets, writers, politicians, sculptors etc.). He has space for six, so he is now moving in my grandfather and grandmother's coffins from Rijeka, and grandgrandmother from Slavonski Brod (rest is in Derventa across in Bosnia, town which Serbs leveled with the earth in 1992). He will also put up his brother's name (he was buried up to his neck alive by the Serbian partisans in 1945, even though he was part of the Croatian partisan underground), and so he has three free slots. He says it is more convenient for him to have them all in Zagreb, as he has an apartment there and they are there often. 

I think he 1) has too much money and nothing reasonable to use it on 2) he is being his usual manic obsessive. In other words, he is thinking of mortality, and the response is a catholic one - it is important there there be a grave, and as many generations of family names on it as possible. 

I ate with a group of Indian colleagues/wives last night and asked them - what do they do with the deceased? A family and friends getting together and remembering - cremation - then a remembrance on the date a year later, each successive year less elaborate. They believe in reincarnation, so the sooner all material aspects are gone, the better for the cosmic cycle - only the saints are buried, ase they have reached nirvana. At the same time, each Hindu is supposed to know his patriarchal descent through 14 generations - this has to do with 1) property 2) arranging marriages. Each Hindu knows the name of the first in the family tree - primordial first, not the 14th generation back, and one avoids marriages between the descendants from the same tree. Only the men count in the tree.

Toichiro Kinoshita makes a transatlantic phone call

 

to Kay, June & Ray Kinoshita, June 2023

 

I should have gone through my diaries and correspondence from 1963-1973 but many deaths and general decay of my generation seems to be getting me down, and I can see I will not get through this any time soon, so here is a tidbit I would have written about. You, being all amazing students, and me almost as good of a student, we have all had decades of recurrent nightmares that go something like this: You have suddenly received a letter from your high school, and they have found out that you had missed the exam in -let's say- biology -and your high school diploma (and the college diploma that followed) is null and void until you complete your biology requirement. This nightmare comes back and back again for years and decades, until the work takes over and you have no time for nightmares any longer.

So, you paid Velma to type it up and you have delivered your PhD thesis in July 1973, you have not as much as touched a computer keyboard for the next 4 years, so traumatic all the computer nonsense had been, once Tom lured you into this madness by giving you first a few easy Feynman integrals that you aced, there was no turning back. Way too much had been invested into the calculation. It was like 2 years in the trenches of Vietnam and that was not what you had gotten into grad school for.

You have totally changed what you work on, you have thrown away anything that might even vaguely smell of your PhD thesis, except for a tiny ring-book that contains the lists of the numerical values of some 1000 (?) Feynman integrals you had computed . It's 1995 (?) and your Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen office phone rings. It's Tom. It cannot be good - he had never called you, and a transatlantic call costs an arm and a leg. Tom wants to know whether I had computed the integral 63-B (let's say). I have no idea, I do not even have my PhD thesis (it's in my American brother's basement someplace in Michigan) but I have this little ring-binder on the bookshelf. I run for it, I find 63-B and wow! 

 

I tell Tom: "Sapirstein did 63-B."
Saved.

The thing is, Tom was not into making mistakes, and I caught all of mine by finding independent calculational methods to cross-check everything - in our 2 years of calculation we found only one, numerically small error in one of our counter-terms, due to a typing error in a Jacobian. We found it by recalculating everything in a new formulation, one which I believe I had invented (my memory is of the idea coming to me while babysitting for a graduate student friend's baby), and Tom believed he had invented (he must have had a different memory, you were too big and too wild for any babysitting).

 

I never found out what happened to Sapirstein.

I have this somewhere in the diaries and letters. But I did find a letter from Tom in the sole ring-binder leftover from my PhD calculations.

 

Toichiro Kinoshita: the theorist whose calculations of g-2 shed light on our understanding of nature - 29 May 2023 Robert P Crease 

Toichiro (“Tom”) Kinoshita (1925–2023): Pioneer of precision in tumultuous times - July 11, 2023 Robert P Crease

Masako Kinoshita - Me & Olivia go way back

Memorial for Toichiro & Masako Kinoshita

 

A regular pervert in the kingdom of Bohrdom

I am living as it were in the very kingdom of Bohrdom, but as the fate would have it, something actually happened here. 

Yesterday fru F. was exiting out onto my balcony, when she perceived a stark naked young man of muscular build and Nordic persuasion standing in the balcony doorway across. He's eyes were closed - bright sunny day - in rapt adoration - and he had the cock out, a rather impressive tool says G. Having been married 7 times, G. knows the available range. So she withdrew into the kitchen - what does she know the Danish customs? 5 minutes later UFO himself came into the kitchen to inspect the sight, and the man was still at it - it is apparently a laborious process. 

Ever since we have been busy - something as exciting has never happened in our little petty bourgeois building - seems we got a regular pervert. Catching up with New York, finally. I have installed locks on back-stair doors and so forth. This is it - the big news. 

Rolling back into abyss of time, backwards: I became a director of the CATS Center (Chaos and Turbulence Studies) I got the Danish Physical Society prize and delivered a major oration. My Wo was in tears with pride. There was 100.000 kroner to this, but it will all go to help rebuild a library of a Croatian University bombed silly by Serbs in one of their paroxysms of fraternal luuuuv. 

Been engaged in much scientific procreation, hormones and doctors and whole schlemiel - does not work, and is sure not fun. But the Wo wants to make a miniP of her own, so we are in clutches of miniscience.

They made me official Windbag, member of the (Danish) Royal Society. Delivered oration explaining Quantum Chaos to archeologists and such. The nodded in awe, said that while usually they only understand the prepositions in physicist's popular talks, this time they understood some nouns and verbs as well. 

Been profoundly disgusted at this planet - fat assed Euro diplomats and such, watching on tely an ongoing genocide, hoping that Serbs just get this over with so all is quiet again. De-pressing. 

On the bright side, variety of local friends kids are also growing into very delightful people - so charming that one could even consider procreation as rational act, and not only the selfish gene in action. 

This grownup life has not much to recommended - everybody exerting civilizing pleasure until there is nothing left that makes life worth living. My strategy has been internalization: I just think Predrag thoughts internally, and I externally nod politely and eat correctly out of color coordinated plates. 

One of the things I miss is freedom to just take off for a week or a month, and wonder in Greenland or somewhere. But we suffer from the dreaded academic 2-body problem - getting 2 jobs in a same place. So I might have to leave all this behind, and head for god knows where. Might be fun...

A not so short history of Universal Function

Acceptance speech - 1993 NKT Research Prize in Physics
Dansk Fysisk Selskab Årsmøde, Lalandia, Rødby, Maj 18, 1993

                                                                           Excerpted and edited July 5, 2019

[For A very brief history of universality in period doubling click here]
[For hyperlinks to some of the literature,  click here]

Among my friends at Cornell were two called Feigenbaum.  The first one moved to a factory town to do union organizing, and reached brief national fame when the Mafia bombed his house.  The other one was amazingly fast in solving New York Times crossword puzzles, but he published nothing. Hans Bethe dispatched him to Blackhole, Virginia, where he languished publishing nothing until Peter Carruthers rescued him and took him to Los Alamos on the risky presumption that the man seemed very smart.  In contrast to these good-for-nothings, I was advertised as the best thing since Roman Jackiw and sent off to Stanford, Princeton and Oxford with a mission to solve the QCD quark confinement problem.

[...]

Mitchell told me about existence of period doubling universality at 10pm on December 19 1975, in a bar in New York City, over a glass of good red wine and in presence of my Black Irish Poetess.

In spring 1976 he came  from Los Alamos to visit Princeton, having published even less than before.  He gave a seminar, but nobody understood a word. Starting point was a parabola, then things got incredibly complicated, and at the end it turned out that the theory might be applicable to fluctuations in forest moth populations.

During his graduate school years at MIT, the strongest intellectual influence on Mitchell was not his adviser Francis Low (of Gell-Mann--Low beta function), who by that time had lost faith in quantum field theory, but charismatic cognitive scientist Jerry Lettvin. So Mitchell and I were driven by a secret agenda - the thing was robust, you could make it very imperfect, and a universal superstructure would survive the imperfections. In other words, just what you need to build a brain - all parts imperfect, and the thing functions anyway.

But my first task was to help my friend, make his lecture comprehensible. My friend Betty Boop worked on a Hewlett-Packard assembly line, so I was able to acquire a discounted programmable pocket calculator (with [multiply] and  [divide] buttons interchanged) for a mere one-fourth of my monthly salary.  Mitchell needed no such display of dedication, Los Alamos was floating in money.

I started thinking about functional equations on May 1, 1976. I calculated away with such gusto that I was calculating even laying on my belly on an operating table, with a surgeon lancing a large bicycle-caused sore. Eventually I reduced the whole complicated mess to one equation, wrote down the period doubling fixed point function equation on May 3, 1976,

and went off to the math library to look it up.  The Institute has an excellent math library, but I did not find it.  As a matter of fact, we never found it to this very day - it had never been written down before.
             For the record: universality in period doubling and the functional renormalization theory that explains it were         Mitchell's discovery, my contribution was to recast what was an infinite tower of renormalization equations into a more concise form.

As one would expect, nobody wanted to hear about it.  To be fair, I remember that a total of four people did:  Freeman Dyson, John Milnor, Bill Thurston, and Donna Lee.  Donna Lee is a wonderful San Franciscan whom I love even more dearly than Dyson; the rest you should know.

Blott, AKA Donna Lee above us to the right. In front: following our friend Stephen Wolfram, Nordita purchased the first Sun-1 in Scandinavia (though this desktop is not it). On the keyboard is one of Mitchell's calculators, on which he did most of his early period-doubling computations.

Six years passed and I was laboring away at Nordita, Copenhagen, when the word arrived from USA; there is chaos, and in August 1981 I could muster an audience for my first talk about the period doubling universality. It was an after-dinner talk in the Perturbative QCD Nordita summer school, Yngsjö, Sweden. In long run, quantum field theorists became dismayed by this theory. Being as intelligent as they were, they should have understood it with no effort, but they did not. But this first evening talk, to innocent, budding theory graduate student was a resounding success.

I went around spreading the news. In those days it was impossible for most to access the literature in a field so new, with foundational publications spread across so many specialties, so a put together a book of source materials:

This was the 3rd of my heavily illustrated home-production books, with hand drawn covers that I called 'Classics Illustrated'. Here we have Graf von Chaos himself as Faust (he loved Goethe) in der Periodenverdoppelnde Wald, cigarette aflame, desirous of Black Irish Poetess, soul aflame with turbulent longings, Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan, eying Die Gleichung. I had just returned from California where it was not unusual that a woman would ask you about your Sign. Plus? Minus? I resent all those violent and horned animals, so I would have to explain that mine was Helix Vulgaris, or the Gentle Garden Snail, the not well known 13th Sign of The Zodiac.

Passover seder with Bram

Professor Pro is convinced that I am Jewish, because I have that gleam in my eye (well, maybe, but that must have been before 1658).

One would find overdose of the alleged gleam in my eyes last Monday - fresh gefelte fish and matzo meal arrived from New York, and there I was, kneading the balls. We had the haggadah, Sigrun's David acted as the youngest child asking the appropriate question, and we had the bitter herbs and matzo and the charoset mortar with which "we" built the pyramids, and the menu that would warm up my Czech grandma's heart - the whole schlmeal.

        There were some irregularities; specially that injunction about circumcised males was not strictly observed - but the rest - the genuine thing. It was beautiful, in a totally unexpected way. I had invited Bram and Ida, which turned out to be something much more important than I had realized. Abraham Pais was musing those days about his survival during the war and about layers of his identity; Jew, Dutch, American, now even a little bit Danish. So for him this was an occasion to remember his orthodox father, and for the first time to sing songs in Hebrew in front of his Nordic beloved; he sang beautifully, with Ashkenazi pronunciation the songs his father liked, and with Sephardic the ones his mother liked. It was very touching, and moving.

        Then Bram told us how he lost his faith. One Shabbat his parents had left him alone in the kitchen, and he stood there with a match in his hand - what would happen if he did the did the forbidden? and - and - he lit the match. He stood there petrified, awaiting the heavens to open and lighting to strike him. Nothing. So there was no God after all.

        Next day I made the error of reading the Exodus and loudly commenting how I feel about that petty and vengeful God of the Jews - that was not wise, as it lead to a scene, with me accused of belittling God.

The Man who made Matzo Balls

PS June 7, 1996

Message from Bram: " I plan to be in Copenhagen for s stretch starting end of June. You are supposed to save a seat by your side for me in the frokoststue."

PS December 4, 1999

Bram Pais saw me in the cafeteria and immediately said:
"You look terrible - What are you doing with this Jewish beard?''
 I said: "How do you know it is a Jewish beard?''
"I know'' he said.

PS October 25, 2000 Apropos Bram

Tina, friskier at 80 than many are at 60, is the woman who hid Abraham Pais in Amsterdam during the war. She told me few months ago I look like Marcelo Mastroiani as we danced to kletzmer at Bram's memorial. It's not true, but it is a sensitive thing to say to a guy of uncertain countenance.

Harry J. Lipkin: "Bram had spent the war in Amsterdam, hidden from the Germans. When he was finally caught and arrested and would have been shot, his teacher Kramers wrote a letter to Heisenberg asking him to help Bram. Heisenberg did nothing. But the heroic Dutch woman who had hidden Bram  during all these years risked her life to go to the Gestapo commander to plea for Bram's release and she took a copy of Kramers' letter to Heisenberg. This was enough to convince the commander to release Bram. His cell mate who had been arrested with him was shot."

Feigenbaum contemplating a cauliflower

It is true: Mitchell has gone live on the 7PM German TV news  contemplating a cauliflower (?)

Zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice

It started by having some great time with Mitchell, theologians and semi-idiots.

Then I ran into a problem, a problem that turned out to be very pleasant, the problem of Eckmannia. That is to say, we actually solved a problem - Eckmann is still convinced that if we could solve it, it must be trivial; "everybody must know that???" - but we finally wrote down the zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice.

I have been thinking about it for at least 3 years - and it finally came out, with a very pretty and sensible answer. So now we have done what I never have done; written a paper in 2 days flat, from first conversation about existence of the problem, to the first complete draft of the paper.

I was also screamed at by some Chinese physicist about importance of his solution of the percolation problem, but I am so happy it made no dent.

The worst meal of my life

Apropos nothing: 

Universität Greifswald has a special place in my heart, as the place where I had the absolutely worst meal of my life, in the University Mensa. I was given what smelled like a barely rinsed plastic plate with multiple indentations, and the mensa cook ladled in some orange-yellow fluid substance that I still do not know what it was.

I also remember fondly watching prisoners in white-black horizontal stripes suits walking in a circle, while talking to the Chair of the Physics Department (his window overlooked the prison yard). Greifswald was brown gray, everything about it and its air was colored by the coal soot.

Greifswald Nonlinear Dynamics Workshop, Trassenheide, GDR, 25 april 1990.

Hallur wins the 3rd world war, European theatre

Hallur wouldn't get of the phone a few minutes ago - had to tell me that he won the 3rd world war, European theatre. He was Warsaw pact - that is better, because Warsaw pact has so much more of everything. He dropped a gas bomb on Bruxelles; NATO retaliated by sending a huge atom bomb - he lost something, he thinks it was called Moscow - blew away most of the screen - but then he got West Germans surrounded, 5 armies encircling their 2; couldn't kill them all, but he won anyway.

Mitchell does prime time TV in Copenhagen

Mitchell has appeared in the leading Danish left-intellectual rag, (Mis)Information, holding a Wonder-bread-like blackboard sponge, pensively, to great merriment of our students who have the picture on our bulletin board, with a variety of captions emanating from his mouth, comic-strip style. It is a reasonable article, from Mitchell's angle the best thing about it is that it is in danish, so he is safe from understanding it, and I ask you only 3 brief stupid questions, so I'm also clean.

Mitchell is now a heartthrob of many a wo in this ducky kingdom. They aired him and Polyakov in prime time, and they re-aired him alone today. It is actually almost sensitively done, considering the foreign worker treatment I got on Danish DR televison.

Well, Mitchell does have his detractors. MargArethe says that he has a strange way of blinking into camera, and that neither he nor Polyakov are her man types. But many a less critical Valkyrie is wet to her knees just at one of those blinks.

Other than that, there is much ballooning around. The Eye's woman is supposed to burst any day or hour now, and Ulla and Natural Radiance bounce around like Venus of Milendorf fertility amulets.

How long is this seriousness going to continue (and this includes Mitchell)? It's deadening, the joy is gone if every act is supposed to be laden with meaning. I'll go home and bounce few balls on the HP - it's trivial childlike game, but it is making me euphoric. All the patriarchal and fessorial responsibility
is dry and dusty as old wood.

Dyson, Tomonaga, Feynman, Schwinger

Sam Taylor, a nuclear engineering undergraduate in my intro nonlinear dynamics class alerted me to a wonderful (Web of Stories) video series of Sam Schweber interviewing Freeman Dyson. 

While I was at the Institute in 1975-1978, I was Freeman's very young friend. What brought us together was that at that time I had been a rather bad dancer in a very charming performance of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience".

Here Freeman is recorded in 1998, looking even more youthful then when I knew him. He was the only physicist who would hear about my 1976 work on universality in chaos. It was the most important thing I accomplished as IAS Fellow, but -fore example- Tullio Regge would not hear of it. Dyson was and remained the only physicist I knew who wanted to learn things regardless of whatever he had done them himself. So he became and remained my only hero and role model in this profession.

Shin'ichirō Tomonaga (and, for me, Tom Kinoshita's war years) enters, unexpected, out of the ashes:

And meanwhile, of course, we'd heard about Tomonaga's work which was, I think, also in the spring of '48, when Tomonaga sent his first two papers from Japan, and these came as an absolute total surprise, that somebody in the rubble of Tokyo was actually able to do physics. I hadn't heard of Tomonaga previously and he wrote to Oppenheimer from Tokyo and Oppenheimer sent a copy of the papers to Hans Bethe in Cornell, and so we saw them there. And these two papers of Tomonaga, it was called, I don't remember... on the many... This was the new Japanese journal "The Progress of Theoretical Physics" which was published in English. It was published on brown paper which was all they had in Tokyo at the time, and it was just like a voice from the deep.

I mean we thought of Japan as being a total ruin and there was this man who had somehow or other kept physics alive all through the war, and there it was. And he'd in fact done all this long before Schwinger and essentially arrived at the same results as Schwinger three or four years earlier, with more or less the same techniques.

About Cornell:

[Schweber] You stay in Cornell for two years and then you go to the Institute. Do you want to say a few words [...] about life at the university there, and what made you decide to [...] accept an invitation to the Institute in '53?

This was a hard choice, because I was spiritually much more at home at Cornell. Cornell is a much warmer place. It's a real community, partly because of Hans. I mean Hans made it like that, but even without Hans - it's a place which commands enormous loyalty. I mean the friends that we made at Cornell 40 years ago, a lot of them are still there. These people just never leave, including Hans himself, who's now been there for 60 years. And so I felt very much at home there and sort of spiritually I still feel more at home in Ithaca than I do in Princeton. So there were these strong forces keeping me at Cornell. Cornell had always been my vision of America, whereas Princeton is not. Princeton is definitely an alien growth in America. Ithaca is the real thing. So from that point of view I would have preferred to stay in Ithaca, and also I love the people there.

About PhDs:

But I hated the PhD system, and that was what - I felt basically out of tune with the main job I had at Cornell, which was to train PhD students. The whole PhD system to me is an abomination. I don't have a PhD myself, I feel myself very lucky I didn't have to go through it. I think it's a gross distortion of the educational process. What happens when I'm responsible for a PhD student, the student is condemned to work on a single problem in order to write a thesis, for maybe two or three years. But my attention span is much shorter than that. I like to work on something intensively for maybe one year or less, get it done with and then go on to something else. So my style just doesn't fit this PhD cycle. What would happen, a PhD student would want to go on working on a problem for two or three years, but I would lose interest before he was finished. And so there was a basic mismatch between the way I like to do physics and this straitjacket which was imposed on the students. And so I found it was very frustrating [...]; all the PhD students had these same constraints imposed on them, which I basically disapprove of. I just don't like the system. I think it is an evil system and it has ruined many lives.

About understanding Schwinger:

That was another of the Columbian experiments done by Kusch and Foley, where they measured the magnetic moment of the electron very precisely, and they found that it was not the Dirac value, but differed from the Dirac value by a certain finite amount, which then Schwinger was able to calculate. [...] It involved things that Schwinger called Green's Functions, which again I found rather incomprehensible, but Schwinger was very obscure when he described the things he was doing. He loved to make the - as Oppenheimer said, most people when they explain something, they're telling you how to do it; but when Schwinger explains something he's telling you that only he can do it! That was roughly the way it was, I mean, so from Schwinger one only had the impression that this was so difficult and so elaborate a way of calculating, only Schwinger could possibly do it. [...] in Ann Arbor in June of '48 I learned the stuff from Schwinger himself. I listened to his lectures in the morning and I spent the afternoons working very hard, just simply going through the Schwinger lectures step by step and really understanding what he'd been saying, which was very hard work because he just had this wonderfully baroque style of lecturing in which everything was dressed up to be as complicated as possible, and the answer somehow came out miraculously at the end.

About Feynman, understanding:

There were two problems which Cécile and I took along for Feynman to deal with... [...], and the scattering of light by light; especially the scattering of light by light had been a sort of a notoriously difficult problem.[...] It was a formidable calculation and it wasn't at all clear that we could do it by the new methods of Feynman. And it was something we had to get straightened out before this whole theory was really complete. So we asked Feynman about this, and he said, 'Let's see about that.' And he sat down and he just worked through it; in about three quarters of an hour he'd done the whole thing and it was the most amazing performance. He just - with his lightning calculations, it all came out very beautifully. It turned out that the third order effect was zero and the fourth order effect was finite and everything worked exactly the way we wanted.

When I entered graduate school, theoretical particle physics was the 1965 Bjorken-Drell "Relativistic Quantum Fields", i.e. Feynman diagrams. Feynman diagrams and Feynman diagrams only. But my academic grandfathers were Feynman and Tomonaga (via Tom Kinoshita), Schwinger (via Tung-Mow Yan), with Freeman my academic godfather. I wrote a book about it. Feynman reviewed it. Were it not for Tung-Mow, I would have never understood the Schwinger tale.

 

Ballur the Dog in love

19 July 1988

We live alone on the farm. Ballur the Dog has developed a strong master craving and follows me everywhere.

Predrag is a bore
Predrag is a boring bore
Predrag is the boringest boring bore

But Ballur the Dog is charming and very doggy in temperament - he is an Icelandic sheepdog, and he a very happy dog who seeks my company irrespective of how boring I might be. We are a very active couple, sharing passion for swimming, running, and avoidance of other human company.

Paris! Par rires, as Rablais claims the etymology is. It is very enchanting, and still, I feel like a mouse there. New York, one feels like a rat. Here, on the farm, I feel content. The truth is, I am very happy to spend weeks and months without human contacts, but it is almost impossible - they stream in, the humans, even on the farm.

Here life is as always - it seems impossible to do 1/10 of the things one expects oneself to be able to do. Even with Ballur there is psychology - he objects to sleeping outside, so he woke me up at 3 am, rotating in a strangest of dog hysteria ways. We had a talk and a little walk, and I was allowed to sleep again.

29 July 1988

I still do not what he wanted. I got up this morning - Ballur says woof! and then sits in front of me, looking me right into the eyes, expectantly, as though I have a large cut of beef between my eyeballs. Usually he wants to run out into the court, but not today - I open the door, but he just follows me again. Watches me brush my teeth.

What is it? Did I forget to feed him yesterday? I rattle his dog food bucket, but he just keeps looking intently into my eyes.

Piss? Shit? Brushing my teeth, we walk into the seeping rain and out of the farmhouse onto the track across the wheat fields. He just dogs me - no crap, nothing. We go back again, an he will not let up; just sits in front of me, expectantly, totally focused on me, with that swooning look of the woman from Midsummer Night Dream who got love potion rubbed over her eyelids.

Could it be? Could it be? oh, no! the dog is in looove. Ballur, you know we cannot go steady - I will have to move back to the city....

Prussian determination

Max-Planck Institute fur Mathematik, Bonn

I have been swimming with Prussian determination every morning for last 5 days. It is like swimming among sharks - there are all these young women out of Leni Riffenstahl's Olympiad zooming by in white spray on their way to Seoul Olympics. I do not know yet whether it helps, but it does give me certain chlorinated radiance.

Night Fishing in Blackhole

January  25, 1988

 Once UFO and I considered moving to his Blackhole to run a megainstitute of Nonscience
- to be filled in from my diary

A letter to Il Coruptore AKA Peter Carruthers

Carissimo Il Coruptore,

I write with moody forebodings of impossibility of attaining anything, the mood reinforced by the cheerfulness of danish December: I do not see how I am going to visit you in the foreseeable future, to the extent that there is future. Maybe next winter? Where did the time go? I thought I would be basking in Arizonian sun right now... But in a few days I am escaping to New York - UF will cheer me up with Wagner and Kindertotten Lieder.

Then I am supposed to be back and do what? Repair rotten doors on my edifice, harangue students? Is that it? All those years of crazy self-reliance? and looove, where did loooove go?

Pagarlo delle Lire, pagarlo delle dollare... Why did I ever turn bourgeois?

di notte nordice
Amleto il Danesco

Hamlet, Feigenbaum constant and the fine structure constant

There is a Procaccian chapter in our Hénon epic that makes me go to Hamlet to cheer up - "... is it better to suffer the outrageous ..." etc etc  soliloquy.

The whole idea was building my Ruinofficio was to have a place big enough to absorb my friends with their nasty habits and still sustain life as we know it. Empty it is as insane as any Latin American deserted oversized hacienda from Marquez.

The madness persists - I am getting visa papers to fly in November to Bezerkley and deliver a single review lecture of profound wisdom to nuclear physicists at LBL. The man in charge is the selfsame person (Switezky) who has related Feigenbaum constant to the fine structure constant, a paper that baffles me even more upon rereading now.

Not sweet paprika, but cayenne

I have been through some rough times. First Fessor Pro has been threatening me with this fat manuscript of uneven quality. It all climaxed one Thursday, with me surrounded with many steaming and burning pots and pans and spices, pushed into a corner by certain Paladin, who insists on teaching me the correct multifractal formalism. Everything in sight is boiling and burning and he is shoving at me pieces of paper covered with old computer code, between lines of which he scribbles integrals over tangent spaces (ie Lyapunovs), with q meaning Chicago tau, s(mu) meaning P(lambda), and everything Bowen-Ruelle-Sinai and indescribably rigorous. As I am nodding in exasperation I note that the spice which I am copiously pouring over the
brew is not sweet paprika, but cayenne, and so on and so forth.

So I fed them cous-cous and they loooooved it and so we proceeded to the Royal Ballet where all was all very cultured and deadly boring. And I am as good as dead. But Romeo and Juliet ballet was a good preview for what followed: we had a 5 (yes, five!) days of a superstrings symposium here, and I went to the lectures in the same spirit as to Romeo and Juliet; I wanted to see strings dead, I wanted to see them all die. But no, it is like Mercutio. He gets stabbed, he falls down and you think it is over. He gets up; dances and falls down. Over? No - here he hops up again, piruets and keels and falls over. And so it goes - on, and on, since Regge poles through duality through extended supergravities to this. When is the s#!t going to die? It is frightning - a whole bunch of bright kids seem set onto making this a life career; oh, die, please die gentle death! The world around us is asking us infinity of fascinating questions - do we have to lobotomize all this young talent?

Feynman's review of my "Field Theory" book

22 May 1985

My program expires today. Vinnie of the Italian Kitchen makes a special dinner for us. UF kidnaps Feynman on Eddy Avenue.

Feynman likes to talk about reception of his book: how steel workers ("I liked that chapter where you say women like to get fucked") and topless dancers invite him to their work places and shows; how somebody's grandmother liked the book. UF veers out of control, and first they compete about who summed which kind of Bessel functions series at age twelve, and then UF keeps discussing details of Little Stevie Wonder's predicament, while Feynman tries to shut him up and absolutely does not want to hear about it. Finally I remember I once drew a portrait of him, and sent him the book with him on the cover, so I ask him what he thought of it. He says,

"What book? I remember somebody once sent me a book with jokes and drawings, it was very bad, I did not like it at all. It made Field Theory look easy when it is not, and it didn't explain it.

If you gave somebody with infinite intelligence and infinite time this book, and told him to learn Field Theory - he could not do it!"

UFO's neuroscience and E&M provocateur

During my visiting professor stint at Cornell, I subbed for Mitchell for one lecture - I told him that I could teach E&M without any formulas, only using birdtracks.eu notation, and I was lucky - got to teach kiddies Green's theorem. There might be someone out there who still wanders what happened that day.

I my clouds video I mentioned some brain related projects that didn't pan out. "Universality in chaos" AKA "period-doubling" does not care what particular system one starts with, and we were wondering how neurons - each one noisy and imperfect in every way - never-the-less build up a pretty robust brain. Could it be that the renormalized (?) composite neuronal system is more robust than all of its imperfect components? It was all very naive and totally wrong. That's not how computational neuroscience has developed since.

I actually spent that semester secretly (in an attic of the Math Department) coding my idea of how a passive observer (a frog on a rock) visually observes and then develops abstract concepts, i.e. learns. That bombed out in an spectacular way. I was using Barbie Burke's husband, John Hamal Hubbard's IBM workstation, and it 1) one day lost all the programs in its memory, and then 2) literally chewed up my back-up diskette when I tried to restore them, thus destroying without any trace (there were no printouts) months of work. That was the end of my secret foray into computational neuroscience. Looking today at ChatGTP billions of parameters, I was way too optimistic about how this would have worked.

In other words, you do not want to get any neuroscience advice from Predrag .

The realm of limbo, limbo and catholicism

My life in Ithaca is very quiet: some evenings I go over to Mitchell and submit to hours of Wagner, some evenings I read children's stories to my friend's real children, still others I watch from my office window beautiful sunsets over Ithaca hills.

Mitchell lives in a Corbusiesque atrocity. It has a curious advertisement in the phone book: "A new environment for living - designed by Marcel Breuer - walk to campus and shopping - modern, beautiful, fireproof."

Ithaca is the same as it ever was - dogs run across the Arts Quad, we wander through the gorges, and check the buds on the trees for signs of the impending spring. At night the bars are full of little women and little but beefy men. Five Burns sisters are singing good rock-n-roll, radiating sex like five demented stars - one is pregnant and due in 10 days - as we dance, just like we always did.

Shipwrecked

Immanuel Kant: "All human knowledge begins with intuitions, then passes to concepts, and ends with ideas."

I have gone into seclusion: I have temporarily lost faith in adults, and I mostly want to quietly work on my physics projects, listen to my friend Mitchell's classical records, and read children stories to my friends children. Of course, I am not terribly good at being a recluse - old friends and lovers keep popping up and treating me with much tenderness.

"all bonds have broken down,
oooo, love is gone
looove is gone..."

Why am I being so melodramatic? It is because of love shipwrecked. Guardian Angel, the woman that I have lived with the last five years has abandoned me at the same time I took a new (permanent?) position in Sweden. I find myself without a family, a home and a country.

"And if my night thoughts could be seen,
they would put my head in the guillotine.
But it's all right ma, I'm only dyyyyying"

Mother Jackie is the same bundle of energy and good cheer as she had always been. She is very busy traveling and writing as art historian - complains that she is overweight (does not stop her from eating
as much as I do) and that a joint in her little finger has become stiff.

Hermann Minkowski in a letter to David Hilbert: "It seems sometimes that through a preoccupation with science, we acquire a firmer hold over the vicissitudes of life and meet them with greater calm, but in reality we have done no more than to find a way to escape from our sorrows."

Sadder is the story of my grandparents. Mother's father died last summer - I visited him almost at the last moment, he could barely talk. He talked to me slowly for a few hours about his life: being persecuted as communist before the war, surviving the concentration camp, life after the end of the war. It was like watching a wavering candle flame... The other grandfather weighs about 120 lb and can barely move - I'll visit them in July.

God, how boring all this petty self-pity is! It all just adds up one and the same thing - the destruction of my world...

A son of Cvitanović in Nice

Sometime in the mid 80's I was wondering around downtown Nice, and struck up a conversation with a man bit younger than myself. Turned out he was a physicist, working in Nice, so he told me his name (Jean-Marc Gambaudo) and I told him mine.

He looked at me, impressed and said "Are you a son of Cvitanovich??!".

"Yes," I said proudly, "I am a son of Cvitanović"

He'll probably be in the audience in Nice Dynamics Days - Europe 2020 :)

Makes sense. For him the work Feigenbaum and I did in 1976 was ancient prehistory, something there along with Cauchy and Faraday. Never told my father (engineer in dairy industry) about it. He had very low opinion of us in academia.

I have been Kepler many times over

Dr. B.B. Mandelbrot (lovingly referred to as "Fattie" by UFO) in NY Times science section: "I would be perfectly happy being Kepler" (to a coming fractals' Newton). Referring to the broad array of things now described by fractals, he added, "I have been Kepler many times over."

The dietary practices of Mr. Universal Function

I arrived to JFK  on December 19, in time for Mitchell's 40th birthday, accompanied by a nineteen year old Aupair Girl.

Mitchell, from now on referred to as UF (Mr. Universal Function, more formally Fessor Feigenbaum) awaits us with champagne and fois gras ready. Aupair Girl says: "Eeek! What is this? It smells like dog food!" and eats it between crackers, to avoid actually tasting it.

At Zabar's it is Christmas shopping madness; the number called at the smoked fish counter is 120 numbers ahead of us. UF buys: 2 boxes crackers, 4 loafs bread, 4 pounds of various fine cheeses, pound caviar and 20 pounds filet mignon for steak tartar. His cousin, who is in catering business and commensurately spherical in shape will provide us with small delicate sweets. Not a single vegetable or fruit... By a miracle an entire smoked salmon has arrived in mail from Trondheim (?!). 60 bottles of Veuve Clicqout Ponsardin are delivered, and put into the refrigerator. UF sits down to calculate the quantity of ice needed to cool them for the party. One needs to remember that the latent heat of 1 gram ice is 80 calories. A quick one page calculation yields 48 kg ice.

This is theoretical physics in action. There was one correction, though. What was not taken into account was the fact that we shopped at Zabars the afternoon before the party. Nothing else needed to be refrigerated, the Champagne bottles remained in the refrigerator arrayed into neat rows, shining like gold bars in the vaults of the Bank of England, and after this correction the amount of ice required was 0.00 kg.

Why 60 bottles of champagne and 100 crackers? That calculation is straighforward: there were to be 30 guests, so UF multiplied his own anticipated consumption by 30. He was somewhat disappointed that after the party there were still 30 bottles and 12 pounds of fillet mignon tartar left. He threw the tartar out: 13 days later there were only 2 bottles left, so I left for Chicago.

Our diet consists of following: one strong coffee in the morning, and red meat and absurdly good red wine in the evening, plus a pack of cigarettes for UF. Buying meat is the ritual of the day. UF picks up various packages of meat and pokes them with his index finger at length, declaring eventually that the piece A (to eye indiscernible from the piece B) is far superior piece of meat than the piece B. He has lived on coffee, wine, meat and cigarettes the last 22 years and is perfectly healthy. As far as I can see, he gets his vitamins from the cigarettes.

UF's home consists of practically nothing beyond a truly excellent record collection and a Hewlett-Packard computer, but UF sits on his world like a hen sits on its eggs. The records have to be turned and dusted this way, the wine glasses have to washed that way, his camera equipment is the best the money can buy but I may not touch it, and he doesn't want to give me a key to the apartment so I would not do God knows what to it, so I finally moved out. Not before I broke the next to the last of his fine crystal wine glasses and the only two european-tacky plates he got out of his marriage. He has not unpacked yet, so almost all of his books sit in boxes in closets, and the boxes get slowly permuted around as he fishes out mementos of the bygone ages. The fate has willed it so: a few years ago UF made one serious attempt to furnish his home by buying a  $1,000 marble table in Italy. This arrived in form of crate of pulverized marbles,  and he is still trying to retrieve the money from the Italian company.

UF has strong feelings about much that we tend to accept without much questioning. "Everything I learned in particle physics was wrong." "1/2 of Landau-Lifshitz is wrong. Classical mechanics is all wrong - he does not understand variational principle. Optics is all wrong. Continuous media."

"British are scum: a degenerate nation of bigots." This is sheer praise, compared to how he feels about Poles. Germans present a special problem, considering that we would sit here in silence, were the German music removed. "Firm announcement: I shall never go into Germany again."

UF is earning unreasonable amounts of money, which, he claims, his stockbroker promptly loses. The Quack money (a complicated linguistic transformation: MacArthur -> MacDonald -> Donald Duck -> Quack) is finally making some impact: UF has erected a dark foreboding monument in his living room, consisting of two black obelisks (world's best speakers?) and in between them a black cairn of amplifiers, preamplifiers, etc., all capable of putting out kilowatts of power. Now when Siegfried bangs his sword, he is right there, in the corner of the room - it is uncanny.

A brief dictionary of UF English: "I saw a nice person there" ( = an attractive woman).  "... it seemed hard to make a connection to this person" (= could not get laid).

There is Hearts, who teaches him anew what looove is, and looming in the future is Beheadings, a specialist on the connections between royal beheadings and changes of styles in Italian poetry. A revealing exchange:

UF: "These are Listz's 13 transcendental etudes..." as he is fondling sensuously the record, on the way to the record player.

Beheadings: "If the piano is tuned, this piece is OK".

UF has gotten himself unreasonably famous. Upon hearing that I live in Fairview heights, Susan, flower child from our era, says: "This very brilliant physicist lives there - I hear he is going to get Nobel Prize." Help. However, not everybody reads New York Times. Kate from Brookings, South Dakota says: "Your friend's name is Feigenbaum? I know that name. Feigenbaums had a funeral parlor in Pierre" (pronounced Peer, South Dakota).

Upon arrival to Ithaca, there are odd few hundred letters waiting for UF (not counting the two hundred Cornell faculty communications). UF breaks into laughter with almost every letter he opens. Examples, with UF's running commentary:

"As a follow up to my letter of August 29, 1984, inviting you to serve as an adjunct faculty member of the Roanoke City Governer's School of Science and Technology, ..." why me?

"How would you like to go to the Naval Surface Weapons Center? The meeting is called Perspectives in Nonlinear Dynamics... I guess I cannot say no to them. They represent all of the money. I can certainly assist in getting us undreamed of amounts of money. You could have a CRAY in your hand." UF lays the letter of invitation carefully to the side.

"Here is the Crapademic Press: I wonder what this means? ' ... please confirm the form of address used on the cover of the journal.' Reverend? His Majesty? M.D.?"

" 'The final notice: ...' ... forget this one..."

"A fan letter from Dr. Ben Braidy. Should I use tweezers to open the letter? 83 years old! That is a pretty advanced age to have AIDS..."

"'Dear Mitch,
... the status of your manuscript on chaos and turbulence... February 1 is the due date specified on the contract ... need to discuss immediately so I can readjust plans for promotion of the book, particularly the advance publicity..." (not one line of this manuscript exists. Besides, UF hates being addressed as "Mitch")

 "Re: Feigenbaum's Number, indispensably in conjunction with Pi."
(Could horse racing be the bridge between Quantum Mechanics and Chaos?)
          Dear Dr. Feigenbaum:
          Five years ago I copyrighted a theory of horse racing under the title "IONICS, THE MATH OF RACING". It consisted of reducing the past performances of race horses to mathematical entities interacting with each other, filtering to a destillate which contained only the winner and the placer as final products. This was possible since I had observed that discretion was exerted in the win-place linkages, and based on a belief that horses, celestial bodies, and electrons are all moving entities. Scientists have told me that I am employing, unknowingly, the principles of quantum mechanics.
         Several months ago, upon having read of your discovery, 4.66+ and its chaotic significance, I was immediately, mind blown! 'For, after all, what could be more chaotic than a horse race?' I thought. And so, I began thinking. I experimented at several tracks in America, Harness or Flats, made no difference. And last October and November at Vincennes Harness Track in Paris, France, and in England (hurdles, dogs, flats) Utoxeter, Wembley.
         The result were all the same -  FEIGENBAUM'S NUMBER CALLED THE SHOTS EVERY TIME!!!!
         In process, I had to discover Pi, also. I can now connect Pi with Feigenbaum's number in about half a dozen ways!!!! In fact, I am now making my living using the constant, Pi, in conjunction with Feigenbaum's number! (Pi won't work without the corroboration of Feigenbaum's number.)
         In certain cases, however, Pi isn't needed at all. In the most spectacular case of all, when Feigenbaum's number yields Pi, an atomic explosion occurs in the form of a longshot! (The full constant, 4.6692016 is used.) (I can't get the last two figures, 09, in my calculator.)
        I have written a 22 page thesis about it for which I have just received my copyright certificate from Washington in addition to having mailed a registered copy to myself and notarized [...] you will be the first. I have spoken of it to no one except my lady friend who understands nothing of it. [...]"

"Who is this Pi?"

The next letter is a form letter:
"'Dear friend,  like the magnificent tennis player, the legendary golfer and the unstoppable running back, Personal Computing is the leader in its field!...'"
UF's association is not the most obvious one. He puts the letter aside and says: "I wonder if there are any direct flights from Aspen to Buchurest?"

Going beyond Manhattan, and all the way to Aspen: a Florida Belgian friend calls me to the side one day and asks me whether I could be Nikki's escort (i.e. Stirling's beard) at Stirling's birthday. "Yes, sure." I have never seen her in my life, but one more time, we are connected through UF in so natural and comfortable manner that when Nikki shows up we immediately recognize each other and fall into a conversation as though it is a continuation of yesterday's conversation.

Nikki says:" I have never been so humiliated in my life. You know what Rosy did? She saw me sitting in the astrophysics seminar, and she publicly chased me out of the seminar: 'you get out, you bitch'. Then she scolded me for an hour, like a little girl. I do not want to hurt her, but what can I do - I love him"

And some crazy story unfolds, with Stirling disappearing one night, and flying out to meet Nikki in some motel, and she keeps repeating "He is so good, I love him."

"Niki, he cannot be that good. He makes bombs..."

"That was before. He is good, he is very good..."

Then there was Pete, totally obsessed by his love for C. and her cruelty, and I felt rather reasonable compared to him. And his crazy daughter, machine gun smuggler and god knows what else.

I seem be sinking into a scientific depression. This is recurrent and more common than the common cold, but this time it is aggravated by a new twist: fear of charlatanism. UF must have given me good PR, or it all makes no sense - I seem to be booked for a good portion of 1986, all invitations but one being of chaotic nature, and what have I done to deserve all this?

Zadnji razgovor sa djedom Bogdanom

Bogdan Golmajer                                     17.3.1902 - 2.9.1984
sin Žarko Golmajer                                          1928 - 26.12.1998
kćer Đurđica (Đeka) Cvitanović                1.3.1924 - 12.5.2009

Popodne smo otišli posjetiti djedu Golmajera. Bio je lijep sunčani dan sredine kolovoza. Ušli smo u njegovu sobu (jedinu sobu u stanu) i ja sam se zaustavio, zaprepašten. On je izgledao kao da su ga tog dana prenijeli iz Jasenovca. Ležao je nepomičan, šlagiran i lagan kao pero - 35 kila, možda, sa divljim pramenom crne kose, i sa neobrijanom četkicom prosjede brade, i upaljenim crvenim ocima.

Ja sam se sjeo uz njega i počeli smo razgovarati. Bio je potpuno svjestan; očekivao me je. Njegove oči su ostale nepomične. Dugo me nije pogledao - možda je prošao cijeli sat prije nego sto je okrenuo oči na mene. Njegov glas, kao i snaga njegovog života, je bio slab, i treperio je u mraku, daleko od mene, kao plamenćic svijeće. Rijeci su dolazile polako, nejasne - tiše i tiše, dok se nisu sasvim zaustavile. Nakon nekog vremena bi se rijeci vratile, i mi smo nastavili. Iza nas su žene glasno govorile, i ja sam ih morao zamoliti da pređu u kuhinju, tako da bih ga mogao čuti. Ja sam mu neko vrijem pričao o Danskoj - o ljudima, o poljoprivredi, o povijesti zemlje. Bogdan me je dugo ozbiljno slušao, a zatim mi rekao da je treća knjiga na lijevo na stelaži od danskog pisca, da se zove "Seljaci". I zbilja, treća knjiga na lijevo se zvala "Seljaci", no pisac je bio poljak.

Ja sam ga zamolio da mi priča o svom životu. I tako mi je on polako počeo pričati o svojem djetinjstvu, o svojoj djeci i ženama, o svom radu kao komunist, o ratu, o logorima i deportacijima, o radu poslije rata:

"Nismo mogli duže razgovarati prošli puta, a htjeo sam... moja prva žena je bila Ljerka, kćerka general Filipovića - onoga koji je osvajao Bosnu. Prekrasno je igrala klavir. Umrla je od raka. Treća žena mi je bila ..."

(glas mu je nestao. Drugu ženu nije spomenuo.)

"u Jasenovcu su je ubili... četvrta je bila Katica... trebao sam ženu da djeci pomognem... rođen sam u Buzetu... fašisti došli, otjerali nas u Sloveniju... talijanski u školama... ja sam pobjegao... u Zagrebu me našao moj direktor,"

(Žarko kaže da je to bio Nazor, ali Bogdan ga nije ni jedanput spomenuo imenom.)

"doveo nas četri u novu učiteljsku školu u Karlovcu. Dobili smo banovinsku potporu za siromašne đake, kuhala nam upraviteljica, a građani nam skupljali odjeću. Tamo sam postao komunist. Proganjali su me. Bio sam učitelj u Banatu pred rat - Nijemcima i Rumunjima. Ne znam dali su me uopće razumjeli. Kad su Nijemci napali SSSR, znali smo da će biti rat, i skupljali smo oružje i medicinske zalihe. Ja sam bio potporučnik. Vida"

(Blagica? nisam siguran da sam ga čuo, jer mu se glas opet ugasio.)

"i ja smo prebacivali i partizane i ranjenike - ljekar je bio u sljedećem selu. Tu smo dugo bili uspješni - onda nas je neko izdao, uhapsili su nas, odveli u Bjelovar, a od tamo u Jasenovac... Vida je također bila zarobljenica. Partizani su napali Jasenovac - ustaše su bježali... sve su ih postrijeljali... a ti koji su jos bili za radnu snagu su poslani u Linz, i od tamo u Mauthausen... Djeku sam vidjeo na kolodvoru... rekao sam joj da ne dođe do vlaka, jer su ustaše trpali obitelji u konvoj... "

(Đeka: "Meni su poručili da će doči konvoj iz Jasenovca, i da im Crveni Kriz - međunarodni, onaj isti kao danas - može dati odjeću i medicinske zalihe - i da će moj otac biti u konvoju. I poručili su mi da je opasnost da će ustaše i obitelji stjerati na vlak. On je bio kao sad - trideset kila je bio - ali je bio jedan od jedinih pet šest koji su bili dovoljno snažni da prenose kufere do vlaka. Oci su mu bile velike i zarile su. Kazao mi je da je upravo prebolio tifus, ali da je to tajio, jer bi ga inače oni ubili. Da su mu rekli da samo jedanput dnevno jede i pije vodu, jer bi ga nakon gladovanja ubila hrana. 'Nemoj ici do vlaka, jer će ustaše utjerati na konvoj - stoj ovdje'. I tako sam ga ja vidjela zadnji
puta, vjerovala sam.")

"... Jasenovac... Njemačka... natrag Dunavom... u Beč... rusi nam dali propusnice... sa vlaka uzeli švercere i trgovce i na mjestu ih strijeljali... nama dali njihova mjesta... mi ukrali tri teleće koze na granici... u Đurđevcu sve uništeno, sve odneseno... seljaku koji je nas vozio su tamo oduzeli auto... ja uspjeo donijesti cijelu kozu do Budrovca. I tako prošla epopeja: kroz strah i lukavštinu i krađu... Došao sam u Zagreb... nakon deset dana su me pozvali da idem u kupke - bile su u Daruvaru - i odmah su me zaposlili... bolje sam se osjećao i tako je i to prošlo... iz ministarstva rada - otvarao nove škole, ustaške zatvarao. Đeka i Žarko su bili kod doktora... Živana sam vidjeo samo jedan puta u mom životu, kad sam radio u Daruvaru... on je autom prošao - nisam htjeo da me vozi - bio je direktor tvornice cipela... Onda kad je tebe rodila - imali smo u tim toplicama školu za zanemarenu djecu... ja nju stavio za upraviteljicu škole, uzela je lječnicku stranu..."

Bilo mu je teško govoriti, sa pola lica paraliziranim.

"...to blato koga se ti sjećaš - to je bilo u Mikleušu, kod Cinkati. Ti si vidjeo ovcu, i onda ozbiljno primijetio 'Nisam znao da su krave tako velike'..."

(Zapravo, već nisam siguran dali mi je to rekao Bogdan, ili Katica.) Ja sam ga pitao sto se s njim desilo '48, kod Informbiroa:

"... imali smo sastanak. Ja sam rekao: 'Kuda Tito kreće, tud mi.' ... prosli smo rat... rekli su mi da će me staviti za direktora/povjerenika tvornice bombona u Slavenskoj Požegi. Ja sam to odbio: 'Ima mladih stručnjaka, neka to oni vode.' Otuda sam premješten u Zagreb u ministarstvo rada. Zadaci su bila otvaranja svih vrsti poljoprivrednih imanja..."

(to je kraj mojih zabilješka o našem razgovoru.)

Mi smo se na koncu pozdravili, ja sam mu obećao uskoro pisati iz Svedske. Na izlazu se Katica rasplakala: njoj je teško vidjeti Bogdana tako slabog, i ona je sama bila na granici ljudskih snaga. Ja sam je zagrlio, poljubio, i tako smo otišli do Zarka i Slavice.

Bogdan je izdahnuo 2. rujna dok ga je Đeka čuvala. On nije bio svjestan, i umro je brzo i jednostavno. Đeka je tužna, mnogo vise sada kada se vise ne brine o njemu, i bacila se opet na svoj rad: putuje mnogo na teren.



Notes:
 
Ponosimo se školom u Budrovcu
            (ovo je škola)

"...  u školi su se izmjenjivali brojni učitelji kojih se i danas mnogi stariji mještani rado sjećaju: učiteljice Justina Rasinec, Dragica Benkek, Ljubica Kolar i Marija Puškaš, učitelj Ivan Litvić, učitelji Vida i Bogdan Golmajer. Oni su poučavali do kraja drugog svjetskog rata. Nastava je održavana na hrvatskom jeziku, a trajala je 4 do 5 godina. Prema žigu u spomenici zvala se „Državna narodna osnovna škola u Budrovcu“.
Učitelji i bračni par, Vida i Bogdan Golmajer, su na žalost, pred kraj drugog svjetskog rata doživjeli tragičnu sudbinu. 18. 3. 1944. uhićeni su u svojoj školi i otpremljeni u ustaški logor Stara Gradiška, a zatim u logor Jasenovac. Učitelj Bogdan transportiran je na prisilan rad u Njemačku, odakle s vratio 1945., dok se učiteljica Vida nije vratila iz Jasenovca."

Mauthausen was liberated 2. May 1945 by Americans. There were approximately 60,000 survivors. One of the camp's survivors was Simon Wiesenthal. Mauthausen was classified as a so-called "category three camp". This was the fiercest category, and for the prisoners it meant "Rûckkehr unerwünscht" (return not desired) and "Vernichtung durch arbeit" (extermination by work).