by Ken Ono
Although we had not been close before, a strong fraternal bond formed between Santa and me during my stay with him in Montreal. Through him, I encountered much of the outside world that had been forbidden to us in Lutherville. He taught me how to lead an independent life, and he supported my adventurous spirit. He took me for my first professional haircut. He taught me how to use the metro and how to navigate a large and bustling city safely on my own. He encouraged me to join Team West Island, a local cycling club. I participated in a few races with them, most notably the Gran Prix Lachine, in which we raced around the lovely Parc Lasalle, with a hyperenthusiastic announcer who referred to me as le jeune Américain. We played softball for his department’s intramural team. We went to the cinema, where we saw the Michael J. Fox film Back to the Future. How I enjoyed not having to write an essay about it! We ate late-night souvlaki at a restaurant called Kojax. I went with Santa and some friends from his lab to my first rock concert, where we saw Corey Hart perform his huge hit Sunglasses at Night at the Montreal Forum.
I have many fond memories of the time I spent in Montreal, and I am certain that I would not be where I am today had I not run away from my former life to live with my brother. It was thanks to Ramanujan that my parents had let me go, but it was Santa who set me on my feet and helped to point me in the right direction.
Santa had arranged a part-time job for me working in his lab, which gave me an important degree of stability. But I was primarily interested in exercising my newfound freedom as a teenager living away from home for the first time. Sneaking into Thomson House, a limestone mansion on the McGill campus where graduate students gathered for drinks after work, was my favorite pastime. We hung out in its stately rooms, and it was there that I developed a taste for Canadian beer: a bottle of Molson Golden or Labatt Blue can still evoke happy memories of my time in Montreal.
During my time in Montreal I was transformed. I developed a relationship with my brother Santa that was closer than any I had ever experienced. He helped me to find my self-confidence, and he taught he how to put fun into my life. He prepared me for life outside our kaikin home in Lutherville, for life in the real world.
Eight months after my father received the letter from Ramanujan’s widow, I was ready to apply to college. I sent applications to Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. Getting into college was much easier in the 1980s than it is today, and I was armed with strong SAT scores (700 verbal and 800 math) and a recommendation from Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley, the man who had devoted his career to studying gifted and talented youth. Despite my status as a high-school dropout, I was accepted by Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Given a choice, there was no way I was going to go to Hopkins. It was much too close to home. So I accepted the offer from the University of Chicago, Santa’s alma mater. The summer passed pleasantly and uneventfully, and in September, my parents drove up to Montreal, and we headed west for Chicago.
Santa’s wedding day in 1989 (left to right: Santa, Wendy Yip-Ono, Takasan, my mother, Momoro, Ken)
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_22
22. College Boy
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Chicago (1985–1988)
I arrived at the University of Chicago in September 1985. Its campus, constructed largely in the collegiate Gothic style, occupies a two-hundred-acre site on Chicago’s south side. The northern and southern parts of the campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a broad mile-long park that was constructed in 1893 for the Columbian Exposition. Whether by chance or design, I was assigned to Santa’s former residence, Burton–Judson Courts, just south of the Midway. I had a room in a first-floor corner suite in Dodd–Mead House, one of the six houses that constitute Burton–Judson. The neo-Gothic architecture, the leaded windows, the view across the Midway to Harper Library, all enhanced my already overbrimming confidence in my success as a college freshman. Several of the older students remembered Santa, and I was delighted to learn that my hero astrophysicist Carl Sagan had lived in the same dormitory in the 1950s, a few doors from my own suite.
The University of Chicago has a long history of admitting students like me. Each year, in fact, Julian Stanley would recommend a handful of high-school dropouts to the university. This year, he had also recommended two brothers from a Chicago suburb, aged ten and eleven. At seventeen, I was clearly not going to be viewed as an “underage” student. The younger brother was a mere pipsqueak of a kid who wore a Pac-Man watch and was so small that his feet dangled well above the floor as he sat in class, swinging his feet wildly like any other restless fourth-grader.
Founded in 1890, the university has risen into the ranks of the world’s top universities. It claims eighty-nine Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni, more than any other institution of higher learning in the world. Many of the world’s leading thinkers have been on the UChicago faculty, including T.S. Eliot, Enrico Fermi, Hardy’s friend Bertrand Russell, to name just a few. I felt myself part of a glorious tradition, and I was ready to sally forth and add my name to the college’s roll of honor. At the very least, I was going to study hard, do well, and not screw up.
My plan, if you could glorify my act of desperation with such an epithet, had worked. I had escaped from high school, and I was somehow given the chance to start life anew, at a first-rate university, with great expectations. It didn’t matter to me that I was a dropout, or that I would have to repeat a grade for failing all my high-school courses if for some reason I had to return to Lutherville.
My parents were worried about me, as they always were, and they were justified in their concern. After all, I had disappointed them in one way after another. But I promised them that I would take college seriously. I even promised to quit bicycle racing. In fact, I left all of my bikes behind. I assured them I would study hard and earn good grades. I felt that I was ready, and I began college with high hopes. I wanted to prove to my parents that by living my life my way, not by their formula, I could succeed.
Alas, I had built my house upon the sand. I had no idea that it would be a mighty struggle to transition from the carefree life I had enjoyed in Montreal to the hardcore labors of a University of Chicago undergraduate. Actually, I didn’t struggle. I didn’t really transition at all. Instead, I reveled in my freedom, and I made the most of new social opportunities and the great city of Chicago. I was no longer one of the few Asian-American kids at school; there were many of us in my freshman class. I was making new friends, and I was focused almost entirely on enjoying every moment of my new life.
Many first-year college students have difficulty adjusting to their sudden freedom from parental supervision, but I suspect that the children of tiger parents are at an even greater risk of crashing and burning. You would think my year in Montreal would have eased the transition, but I guess I had a lot more pent up in me that was waiting to burst out. I lived recklessly, and today, as a professor at Emory University, I witness the same sort of behavior among each new crop of first-year students. College life offers all sorts of forbidden fruit, and many kids overindulge, as though there were a biological imperative to make up for lost time.
And boy, did I make up for lost time! I was a total goofball. I went to lots of parties. I lived for Harold’s fried chicken, a super-tasty, cholesterol-laden delight smothered in hot sauce and barbeque sauce, which was prepared in enormous deep fryers behind a thick wall of bulletproof glass. I was a regular at Medusa’s, an underground dance club near Wrigley Field that was popular among underage college students.
My predetermined path was mathematics, so I of course rejected it, deciding to take premed courses instead. Two months into the quarter, I took my first exam i
n honors chemistry. I received a C+. I suppose the A and B students were studying more and partying less. Staring at the exam as I walked back to Burton–Judson in the dark, I was in a state of shock. I had never received such a poor grade on an exam before. In fact, I don’t think I had ever received a grade as low as an A–. I had the urge to run, at once, and as far away as possible. But I couldn’t run anywhere. The campus was enclosed by dangerous neighborhoods on three sides and Lake Michigan on the fourth. That mediocre grade deflated my self-confidence. I was no longer enjoying college life.
Then I got an F on my first paper in my common core course in sociology. The professor, a distinguished economist, began his lengthy comments, written in damning red ink, with the words, “It is obvious to me that you do not understand much of Marx at all.” High-school classes had been a breeze. UChicago classes were putting up a strong headwind. My professors were respected leaders in their fields, and they all had high expectations. The voices in my head were ready to chime in with their condemnation: “Ken-chan, you no good. You not study hard enough.” Out of those voices I was finally able to compose a simple syllogism: if you don’t want to be a failure, Ken-chan, you had better apply yourself.
Like Ramanujan, I struggled with college, although both of us had the intellectual ability to earn good grades. Each of us, however, suffered from an addiction. Ramanujan was addicted to mathematics and was achieving important results, while I was addicted to goofing off and having a good time and was not achieving much of anything.
Although I knew that if I applied myself to my courses, I could do well, I did my best, immature lad that I was, to avoid having to come to terms with anything whatsoever. Instead of working harder, I simply abandoned premed, switching my major to mathematics. I was not happy about returning to my predestined path, but I figured I could get by much more easily in math than in the other majors offered at UChicago, despite the fact that I was behind the other math majors in coursework, including the two prodigious brothers. Most UChicago math majors entered college having taken at least one year of calculus. I, on the other hand, having dropped out of high school, had never taken any calculus at all. Of course, I would have taken calculus in high school had I not dropped out, so I didn’t feel quite like a dummy. But I knew that I had some catching up to do.
My speculation turned out to be correct. I was able to earn respectable grades in my math courses without exerting much effort, and that was important, because at the time, effort was not my strong suit. I had a knack for learning proofs, and that was enough to get by.
I took courses from distinguished mathematicians such as Israel Herstein and Raghavan Narasimhan. I did reasonably well in their classes, but I was not a star student. I wasn’t even an excellent student. It was as though I was seeking mediocrity. I didn’t want to compete and be recognized as someone exceptional. Instead, I sat in the back row of my math classes seeking anonymity. I didn’t want to return to my high-school role as the nerdy Asian-American kid.
In the spring quarter, I took Math 175, Introduction to Number Theory, from Professor Herstein. The two prodigious brothers were also in that popular class, and they sat next to each other in the front of the classroom while I skulked in the back row. I had enrolled in the course because I had heard about the legendary Israel Herstein years earlier from my father. Unfortunately, it turned out that Herstein was seriously ill with cancer. Although he hid the fact of his illness, he was not himself, and he probably should not have been teaching the class.
He would shuffle back and forth behind the lectern, taking drags of a cigarette between sentences. He wrote almost nothing on the board. Instead, he would lecture by bombarding us with questions in an angry tone. He was so intimidating that almost no one ever answered. There was certainly no way that I was going to volunteer, even when I knew the answer, for fear of resurrecting my old image as an Asian-American math nerd. In class after class, he bombarded us with his hostile questioning, and we sat, silent. Out of frustration, he would throw chalk at us, even saying one day that he could “teach this stuff to monkeys.” Although I did fairly well in his class, my negative experience blinded me to any possible beauty in number theory. I would continue to do mathematics, but there was no way that I was going to like it. My plan was to earn decent grades while putting forth minimal effort. My goal was to get by in my courses while leaving enough time for my first priority, my social life.
Although, as promised, I wasn’t racing my freshman year, I began doing some cycling. Having left my Peugeot in Lutherville, I had to obtain a bike, and I lucked out. A friend in Burton–Judson lent me a decent Peugeot, which he let me keep in my room. I went for long rides on the Chicago lakefront. On one of those rides, I met Tom Kauffman, a fifty-five-year-old security guard at the Illinois Institute of Technology who was one of the area’s top racers in his age group. He often invited me to join him on his rides, teaching me the circuitous routes that offered safe passage through the tough neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side. Tom, who was a high-school dropout like me, had been a cook in the U.S. Navy. He became one of my confidants, a father figure who nurtured me outside of my college life. I rode a good deal, both with and without Tom, and I was soon back in good form.
And it came to pass that I got through my first year at UChicago, if not with flying colors, at least not with my tail between my legs. I spent the summer back in Montreal, working in my brother’s laboratory cleaning test tubes.
On returning to Chicago in the fall, I soon realized how much I missed bike racing. So after a year of keeping my no-racing pledge, I went off the wagon, without telling my parents. It wasn’t long before I was invited to race for the South Chicago Wheelmen, a local club sponsored by Schwinn Bicycles and the Chicago Dough Company, a local Italian restaurant. I was passionate about cycling, but I had no idea that I would one day be just as passionate about mathematics.
Tom and I had become quite close, spending hours traveling, odd couple that we were, to races all over the country. He would race in his age group, while I was learning the ins and outs of competing in the senior eighteen to thirty-four contingent. Tom won almost every race he entered, while I struggled to perform in races that were much longer and faster than those to which I had been accustomed in the fifteen-to-seventeen age group. Thanks to Tom’s patience and mentorship, I advanced through the ranks and became an accomplished cyclist. I knew Tom for only a few years before his life was tragically cut short when he was killed at work, the victim of a stray bullet. I still grieve over my loss, and I am thankful for the time we spent together. Tom taught me that you didn’t need an advanced degree to live a happy and fulfilled life.
My first pedal stroke of the 1987 Mid-America Time Trial Championships
Cycling helped me in unexpected ways. The exercise, of course, was good for my health. If I was going to have a sound mind, it needed to be housed in a sound body. But the most important benefit was the strength of character I built from the regimen of long daily training rides in unforgiving conditions, including dodging cars in Chicago traffic and negotiating unfriendly neighborhoods, a daily real-life version of the classic Disney film Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. My wild wintry rides were often miserable, thanks to ice, snow, and the piercing bone-chilling winds off Lake Michigan. I have painful memories of frostbitten cheeks and numb fingers and toes on those early-morning rides to Sauk Village, Illinois, twenty-five miles to the south. The return trips were mighty struggles against freezing headwinds in a desperate race to get back in time for my morning classes, a race that I often lost.
That fall, I joined the Psi Upsilon fraternity, a fun-loving crazy group of guys who lived in an old house across from Bartlett Gymnasium on University Avenue. The house had been around since 1917 and had acquired a permanent odor of stale beer and Pine-Sol, and its creaky stairs did little to conceal its age. I was proud to be a brother, to be part of a lineage that included Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and football star Jay Berwanger, the first to be awarded
the Heisman trophy. To think that only a year before, at the beginning of my time in Montreal, I had been terrified of living in an “Animal House,” and now I was a card-carrying member of an Animal House and loving it.
Psi Upsilon fraternity house (photo by Doug Jackman and Chuck Werner)
I never told my parents that I had joined Psi U. It was one more thing that I hid from them, just as I had hidden my seventh-grade math tests. I had no desire to subject myself ever again to their withering criticism. As a brother at Psi U, I became a respectable foosball player. I also became a DJ, following in the footsteps of my friends Joe “Spike” Melendres and Harold “Hoda” Tsai. We spun twelve-inch singles at campus dance parties. New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle and Dead or Alive’s Brand New Lover were my favorites.
Preparing to deejay a Psi U Halloween party (left to right: Spike in costume, Ken Ono) (photo by Joe Melendres)
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_23
23. Erika
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
I had moved out of Burton–Judson at the end of my freshman year and was now living in Shoreland Hall, a building dating from the 1920s, when it opened as the luxury Shoreland Hotel, a place where Al Capone held “business” meetings and Jimmy Hoffa kept a room. Another famous resident was the economist Milton Friedman. But nothing lasts forever (except eternity), and by the 1970s, the Shoreland had come down in the world considerably. Needing another dormitory, the university bought the hotel and converted it into a residence hall. That incarnation lasted until 2009, when it was sold to a private developer and renovated into luxury apartments. I had a room on the sixth floor with a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan.
