by Ken Ono
One of the resident heads in Shoreland had a cherubic, bubbly three-year-old daughter named Kelsey. Whenever Kelsey and her mom ate dinner with us in the cafeteria, Kelsey was the center of attention. We all loved her, and there wasn’t enough of her to go around. But Kelsey had a favorite, a freshman girl from Montana with green eyes and wavy blond hair. Whenever Erika was around, you were likely as not to find Kelsey in her lap.
Many of my earliest memories of Erika Anderson, who in 1990 would become Erika Ono, are related, if a bit tangentially, to cycling. I would breakfast at Pierce Dining Hall on Saturday mornings before almost anyone else was awake. I wanted to get an early start to my long training rides into northern Indiana. Erika, who was a freshman in 1986, had drawn the morning shift at Pierce as part of her work–study job. Despite the early hour, she always had a smile on her face, a smile that I looked forward to seeing week after week. She made me delicious omelets, and she smuggled bunches of bananas to sustain me on my long rides. She has been sustaining and nurturing me ever since.
Erika, the love of my life, is a gift from Missoula, Montana. Missoula is a geological oddity; it is located at the convergence of five mountain ranges and the confluence of three rivers, and as its topography suggests, it is a place rich in natural beauty, some of which, as I think I have suggested, had recently migrated to Chicago. Lewis and Clark were the first European explorers to visit the area, and it is the setting of the classic autobiographical novel A River Runs Through It, a tale of two brothers coming of age during the Great Depression and the Prohibition era.
Unlike my family, in which the focus had always been on intellectual achievement, Erika’s family emphasized spiritual and physical communion with nature. Missoula was the perfect place for their active lives. Erika’s father, Robin, who taught high-school biology for thirty-five years, is an all-around athlete and outdoorsman. He is a fly fisherman, Nordic skier, runner, and windsurfer. Erika’s mother, Jan, who was an elementary-school librarian, was a national-class downhill skier in high school. She played soccer and ice hockey into her sixties. Erika emerged from their parenting as the adventurous, fun, maternal, thoughtful, and warm person that has blessed me throughout my adult life.
With Erika at the 1987 Psi Upsilon Valentine’s Day formal
And it is not only I who have been blessed by Erika’s presence. Although she studied French literature at the University of Chicago, it was there that she discovered her true passion: babies and their mothers. She would later earn a second undergraduate degree in nursing, and then a master’s degree in nurse midwifery from the University of Pennsylvania. She loves helping women discover their strengths as they become mothers. She has welcomed hundreds of babies into the world, two of them ours.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_24
24. The Pirate Professor
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 (1988–1989)
UChicago’s Department of Mathematics is located in Eckhart Hall, a distinguished neo-Gothic building on the main quadrangle across the street from Alpha Delta Phi, a rival fraternity. Many famous mathematicians have taught in this building, including André Weil, the man who discovered my father in 1955 in Tokyo. The department’s history and the imposing nature of the building intimidated me from day one.
Despite my desire for anonymity, it was soon apparent that a math major named Ono had nowhere to hide. It was well known among the math faculty that I was the son of the famous Takashi Ono at Johns Hopkins. Professor Walter Baily, a senior number theorist and family friend, showed great kindness to me by inviting me to his home for dinner my freshman year. He welcomed me to UChicago, and as a family friend, he wanted me to know that he was always available in case I ever needed anything. Here was a chance for a friend and mentor in my major field. But stubborn fool that I was, I never spoke with him again. I didn’t want to be known as Ono’s son, and I was too insecure to feel that I deserved the goodwill of such an eminent mathematician. My failure to accept his friendship and mentorship haunts me to this day. Even long after I finally grew up and figured out who I was, I never took the opportunity to reconnect with him. And now it is too late. Professor Baily passed away in 2013.
My inability to remain anonymous was disconcerting. Not only was I expected to be a star simply on account of my name, I felt that if I fell short, my failure would not be mine alone; I would be disappointing and embarrassing my father. I had put half a continent between myself and my parents, yet despite the distance that separated us, I still heard voices that hammered at my self-esteem:Ken-chan, you no can hide. Your professors know family, so it your duty to live up to name of Ono. You must be one of best, and right now you losing out to ten-year-old kid with Pac-Man watch.
I didn’t care enough to apply myself to my coursework. I was having too much fun spinning records at Psi U and grinding the gears of my bicycle in races all over the midwest. I stubbornly rebelled against my parental voices. I wasn’t going to let them tell me what to do. It’s not as though I was still the goofball screw-up of my freshman year. I was taking difficult math classes, and I was earning acceptable grades. To my frat brothers and cycling friends, I was some kind of math god merely based on the names of the courses I took, which included Differentiable Manifolds, Algebraic Topology, and Number Theory. I wasn’t a brilliant math major, but I was doing well among a cohort of strong students. It didn’t seem fair that the voices in my head continued to speak relentlessly to me about my inadequacy.
But I had finally to admit that in some sense, perverted though it may perhaps have been, there was some truth to what those voices were saying. The best math majors at UChicago were extremely talented, and many first-rate majors maximized a less-than-extreme talent through hard work. Without talent and a strong work ethic, you were not going to be a star student at UChicago. In this regard, if I entertained thoughts of being “among the best” at UChicago, then it was true that I was inadequate. I was talented, but I was no genius. You can be a talented composer and work hard at your craft, and then along comes a ten-year-old Mozart and leaves you in the dust. You can be a talented number theorist and labor over theta-function identities, and then along comes a Ramanujan, and you realize that there are minds that pull this stuff out of a dimension to which you will never have access. To be sure, I could have done much better than I was doing, but I wasn’t willing to put up with the late nights of problem sets. I wanted to enjoy my social life in Psi U, and I wanted to race my bike on weekends. And furthermore, if I gave my studies my all and still came up short, my voices would triumph over me. For now, I could tell them, “Of course I am inadequate, but that’s because I’m not really trying.”
I didn’t know how to work hard enough to make the most of my talent, and I didn’t have the will to find out how. It would take many years before I would be able to come back that short distance correctly. So I told the voices to go to hell. I rejected any desire to earn the praise and approval of my parents. I had decided that their goals for me would not be mine. But without their goals, I had no long-term goals at all. I was just marking time.
Then a shocking incident occurred at the end of my junior year. My instructor in complex analysis, who was a junior visiting professor, summoned me to his office on the second floor of Eckhart Hall. The course requirements included three midterms and a final exam. I had earned a high A on the first midterm and a low A on the second one. On the third exam, I think I earned a B, a sign that I hadn’t compensated for the increasing difficulty of the subject by increased effort. But I had plenty of points from the earlier exams. In fact, I had an A-minus average, so why was I being summoned? What did this instructor want?
I had never been to his office,
and so I was surprised by the sight of his stark, barren room when I found it. Apart from a few books and some papers, the office was nearly empty, and it was covered in years of dust. There were almost no personal belongings. Here was someone who apparently lived entirely in his mind. All he needed was a desk and chair.
He told me that he knew my father and that he felt compelled to tell me that from what he had seen of my work, I was unlikely to be successful as a professional mathematician. If that was what I was aiming toward, then I was wasting my time chasing a hopeless dream. He encouraged me to pursue some other career, one that didn’t involve proving abstract mathematical theorems. He had concluded that I didn’t have the talent to make it as a theoretical mathematician. But that was not to say that I had no gift for working with numbers. Perhaps I should consider a career in finance or banking.
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was a real live person confirming the voices in my head. Everything that he was saying added up to one simple sentence: “Ken-chan, you no good.” I was so angry that it took all my self-possession to keep from shouting at him. He must have assumed that I was working hard in his class, giving it my all, when in fact, I was putting in hardly any effort. How dare he tell me that I wasn’t up to snuff!
Although I laughed the incident off with friends a few hours later over beers at the frat house, I was still burning with rage. I knew that I had no intention of becoming a mathematician, but who was this interloper to tell me that I didn’t have it in me to become one if I so chose? On the other hand, it was true that I was performing at a level below my ability. If that professor had known how little effort I was putting into his class, he would have been right to question my maturity and work ethic. But where did he get off questioning my ability, when I hadn’t even begun to show what I could do if I tried? The way I saw it, that professor had come to regard me as the struggling son of a famous mathematician who didn’t have a prayer of living up to his father’s expectations.
I wasn’t going to take that without hitting back! Although my first reaction was one of anger, what followed was a mixture of pride and defiance. No random professor was going to tell me what I was or wasn’t capable of doing. It was one thing to rebel against my parents and the voices in my head, but this stranger had put my back up. I am sure that he thought he was offering me sound advice. But I was going to show him! I vowed that I would make some serious changes in my senior year and turn things around. I still held out little hope that I would ever drown out the negative voices in my head, and I didn’t believe that I could ever earn the approval and respect of my father, but nevertheless, I would set a lesser goal and show those professors that I could work hard and be a strong student, one worthy of their respect.
I spent the following summer racing my Italian Basso bike and interning for a Chicago actuarial firm. While watching TV one evening in my room at Psi U, I encountered the BBC documentary Ramanujan: Letters from an Indian Clerk. It was four years since I had thought about Ramanujan, and hearing his uplifting story again gave me hope. And this time, the story was on screen, in color, and I was mesmerized by the footage of Cambridge, England, and villages in south India. I was fascinated by interviews with the distinguished scientists George Andrews, of Penn State, who would later become my colleague; Béla Bollobás, of Cambridge University; and the Nobel-laureate physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, of UChicago.
Thanks to Ramanujan, my parents had allowed me to run away from my former life. Four years later, as a rising college senior, uplifted by the documentary on Ramanujan and goaded by the realization that I had only three quarters of college left, I vowed to give my coursework my full attention. I was no longer ashamed of being an Asian-American math nerd and the son of tiger parents, one of whom was a famous mathematician. Thinking again about Ramanujan helped me appreciate my knack for numbers. I decided to embrace my identity as an Asian-American tiger cub with some talent for math, and I prepared to apply myself in my courses my senior year. I would prove to the UChicago math faculty that I had real ability, that I should be taken seriously. I would worry later about what I would do with the rest of my life.
I moved out of Psi U, and I didn’t go to many parties my senior year. I devoted myself to mathematics, Erika, and bike racing. I was invited to race for the Pepsi-Miyata cycling team, one of the best teams in the midwest. We raced on state-of-the-art Miyata bikes, and our skinsuits made us look more like giant cans of Pepsi Cola than super-skinny cyclists. My main traveling partner was Ron Lynch, who would later be a groomsman at my wedding. We crisscrossed the midwest in his Subaru, traveling to races with U2’s Joshua Tree blaring on the stereo. The 1989 season, my last as a competitive cyclist, would end for me on Father’s Day in Philadelphia at a place called Manayunk, where I got the chance to race three-time Tour de France champion Greg Lemond in person in the Core States Cycling Championship. It was an awesome experience.
Racing up the Manayunk Wall in 1989 (photo by Dave Mathis)
I enrolled in challenging math courses my senior year, and I made it a point to stand out. I sat in the front row. I did all the homework. I spoke up often in class. I still wasn’t passionate about the mathematics, but I enjoyed the newfound attention from my professors. I took one particularly challenging class from Professor Paul Sally, who was known as the “Pirate Professor” because of his towering figure, colorful personality, and eye patch.
Sally suffered from adult-onset diabetes, and his body slowly betrayed him over the twenty-five years that I knew him. He died unexpectedly on December 20, 2013. By the time I was a student in his analysis class in 1988, he had lost the use of his left eye, whence the eye patch. Later, he would lose the use of his legs, first one, then the other, being finally left wheelchair-bound as a double amputee. In the last years of his life, he was almost blind. Despite all of his health problems, he was a dominant figure with a booming voice at UChicago. He had a take-no-prisoners approach to undergraduate mentoring. He sensed that there was something in me that needed nurturing, and he was there to help me find my way.
“Pirate Professor” Paul Sally (photo by Sharat Ganapati)
Shortly after Halloween, he called me into his office, which was actually a spacious suite of rooms on the second floor of Eckhart Hall. Nature apparently abhors a vacuum more in some places than in others, and this was one of them. Almost every square inch of Professor Sally’s suite was covered in mountain ranges of books and escarpments of papers stacked high on the floor, on desks, on tables, in a geological formation that must have taken him decades to create. There was just room for a fridge in the corner and access to a super-dusty chalkboard covered with formulas and Sally’s weekly schedule.
It was just the spot for a heart-to-heart conversation. Sally told me that I was one of the best students in his class, which also included some UChicago graduate students, and so he wanted to chat about my future. He did this with many of the math majors at UChicago. Sally was a world-class mentor, serving for decades as the department’s director of undergraduate studies.
I told him that I didn’t have much fondness for mathematics, and I began to relax when he didn’t reproach me. He said that whether I liked math or not, I appeared to have a talent for it. He mentioned my uneven performance in UChicago’s math classes, of which he had firsthand knowledge, and he told me that he respected the fact that I was an avid bike racer. He must have known about that from a few articles about my cycling in the Chicago Maroon, the campus paper. Then, to my surprise, he told me that we had a lot in common. His first passion, he said, hadn’t been mathematics; it was basketball. He had been a star player for Boston College High School in the 1950s. He, too, had pursued a number of interests during his undergraduate years, and had been unsure about a future in mathematics. However, at some point, something sparked his desire to pursue mathematics, and he somehow found his way, his journey eventually taking him to a professorship at UChicago. He mentioned that for a brief stretch, he had worked as
a Boston taxicab driver. His story helped me understand that one doesn’t have to follow a predetermined path to achieve something in life, that one can find one’s way without knowing it at the outset. It gave me hope that I, too, could find my way.
From then on, I went to see Professor Sally in his office three or four times each week. I would show up at his office hours even when I didn’t have any questions. I was simply drawn to the man, the most interesting and caring professor I had at Chicago. Every time I showed up at his office, his Boston accent would boom, “Hey man, give it there!” with a large fist extended in my direction. We had a special relationship, which continued until his death in 2013. I miss him deeply.
He suggested that I give graduate school a try. “After all,” he said, “the mathematics one learns in college barely resembles the stuff that research mathematicians do. It might surprise you, and you might really like the stuff.” Sally’s confidence in me somehow gave me confidence in myself. He made phone calls on my behalf, and on the strength of his belief in my ability, he single-handedly got me into some of the top doctoral programs in mathematics. I accepted an offer to attend UCLA on scholarship. It would be a fresh start, in a much more forgiving climate.
It wasn’t just the climate. There was Erika. We had been virtually inseparable for two years, and we knew that we would spend the rest of our lives together. She would need a second bachelor’s degree toward becoming a nurse midwife, and UCLA had a strong nursing program. Erika had one more year at Chicago to complete her degree, and we wistfully agreed that spending a year apart was in our long-term interest.
