2008 Woodie Awards
Math, Physics and Mischief
Larry Schulman
Issue date: 5/16/05 Section: YUdaica
- Page 1 of 1
I've enjoyed reading the YUdaica contributions of my fellow alumni, but come away with a feeling of unreality. Were we all so mature? So devout? I recall a YU school song, something about "Golden Domes over Amsterdam Avenue." To us they looked patina green. So while some of my classmates went south to root out the evil of racism (yes, we had civil rights activists) a bunch of my friends were thinking of fighting for truth (in advertising?) by using a can of yellow paint on those difficult-to-access domes. (Don't try this.)
Which is to say that we - and Orthodox Jewry in general - were not as serious in those days. For whatever reason, we and (lehavdil) our historical offshoots have since moved to the right. Speaking about the others at least, I do not think their zeal has been a boon to humanity. Of course there were things we were serious about. When not plotting mischief, all that I wanted to spend time on was mathematics and physics.
But distraction was inevitable. Dr. David Mirsky was my English professor, and from the myopic perspective of an undergraduate all I knew is that he set a new standard of expression for me. I would not have chosen to spend a year or two on writing and literature, but it has certainly influenced the rest of my life. Somehow there was also time for a stint as a reporter for The Commentator under then editor Murray Laulicht, another place to learn how to express oneself. Succinctly. And finally, my major non science experience of the freshman year was the shiur of R. Weiss. Coming from the boonies (Elizabeth/Newark, New Jersey) this was the majors. Looking for peshat turned out to be a lot tougher than understanding Rolle's Theorem.
But science was the real center of my life (which my wife complains is still the case) and there I had astounding luck. For a brief flicker of time Yeshiva became a serious player in this arena. The now defunct Belfer Graduate School of Science was born a bit before I entered, and phased out some years later. But during my four years I had a fantastic educational experience. Learned a lot more than in my subsequent graduate studies at Princeton. My baptism of fire (if you'll forgive the expression) was an innocent sounding course in Algebra in my sophomore year. OK, it was a graduate course, but algebra? How bad could it be? The instructor was D. J. Newman, with whom I later had contact in his capacity as coach for the Putnam mathematics competition (so I was a varsity player in something). I am nostalgic for that kind of professor. I am nostalgic to BE that sort of professor. Nowadays certain university officials insist that the aim is to make the student a satisfied customer. Not Donald Newman. He marched ahead, and after each two hour lecture I would spend many more hours parsing his words, algebra books before me, trying to master the subject. For the second semester of this experience he needed to sign something to again allow me, an undergraduate, to attend. True to form, he didn't recognize me, although a priest from Fordham and I had gotten the only A's in the course. Which is not to say that some of our instructors weren't both outstanding mathematicians and inspiring teachers: Bernard Epstein comes to mind. I took complex variables with him, but in a real variables course his students were so amused by his constant request, "Give me an epsilon," that for the last lecture of the semester they prepared a large poster with the Greek letter beautifully calligraphed, and presented it to him...GAVE it to him...as a token of his wonderful instruction.
In physics, since this is now my field, I can attest that we had world class scientists as our teachers. For freshman physics I had Joel Lebowitz, now a friend and colleague (and incidentally besides being a leader in the field of statistical mechanics a significant battler for human rights, including, for Jews in Soviet Russia). One of the most original minds in physics is David Finkelstein, with whom I was lucky enough to have my first quantum course. Again this is someone who has become a friend and colleague, but with some special features that befit original minds. At one point he was my guest at the Technion and we made a little party at my house in his honor. The guest of honor of course sat in a big comfortable chair. After the party he left but returned two minutes later. The keys to his car were missing. We turned over the big chair and shook it, but to no avail, and it was only masterful self control that kept me from turning him over. (Ultimately I broke into the car with a coat hanger, but that did not yield keys lying in the floor, and my skills did not extend to hot wiring the engine.) Any of you who has studied quantum mechanics knows that it SHOULD make you worry, that reconciling it with the world you thought you knew is not easy (more of a strain than relativity), so that having Finkelstein to guide us into this intellectual challenge was as good as you could get. I won't try to make my list exhaustive, but it really does go on.
One of the big improvements in college education since my time is what's known as an AREU@Cresearch experience for undergraduates. The real fun of science is the research, and it is easy to go through years and years of study without finding this out. Here too I was lucky. Harry Rauch, another of the math professors, had NSF money which he used to support an undergraduate over the summer. But along research lines, my best experience was with Finkelstein. He gave a general relativity course. As you (should) know, the first and most famous test of this theory was Eddington's measurement of the bending of light around the sun during a 1919 eclipse. (Besides its scientific import this was hailed at the time as a triumph of science over nationalism: a British scientist confirming the theories of a German, shortly after the end of World War I.) It occurred to me while taking this course that light from distant stars or galaxies could bend around other intervening masses, so I estimated the effect, estimated the likelihood of observing this, and did all the things a real scientist would do. This was my term paper, as it were, for Finkelstein, who guided me through it with exemplary comments -and selective silence. This was my first "discovery." I later learned that I had been scooped by Einstein (hence my admiration for Finkelstein's silence), which detracted not at all from the fun. Two comments: today this phenomenon is the basis of Amicrolensing,@ an important tool for discovering and measuring dark matter. And Czech friends have uncovered correspondence from a Jewish engineer in Prague who wrote to Einstein (I think in 1922) proposing this idea.
Another feature and I hope this has not changed, was having talented fellow students. I had been accepted to other schools where (except for those admitted for their parents' donations) the intellectual level was guaranteed to be high. But Yeshiva was a place people went to because they had other priorities, so the fact that Yeshiva was not Princeton nevertheless allowed you to have outstanding classmates. One is now professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University with our last near contact being that we did our miluim in the same communications oriented structure near Tel Aviv. Others were of a similar caliber, although the vagaries of life and the proliferation of scientific specialties have kept their progress from me. And finally not everything does revolve about science, so that some college friendships have lasted a lifetime, although here too, geography is destiny, and living away from the centers has weakened my connections.
Before I entered Yeshiva, a recent graduate, my late cousin Allen told me he had done all his studying after 3 a.m. Of course I discounted this, although Allen was not one to try to make a big impression on his little cousin. It turned out that for me it was 5 a.m. Why? Three to five a.m. was the time that we - I, my roommate(s) and the guys down the hall - solved the big philosophical problems of the day. I hope you're still doing that.
Dr. Larry Schulman, YC '63, did his graduate work at Princeton University and then to faculty positions at Indiana University, the Haifa Technion (where his kids grew up) and now Clarkson University in northern New York.
Which is to say that we - and Orthodox Jewry in general - were not as serious in those days. For whatever reason, we and (lehavdil) our historical offshoots have since moved to the right. Speaking about the others at least, I do not think their zeal has been a boon to humanity. Of course there were things we were serious about. When not plotting mischief, all that I wanted to spend time on was mathematics and physics.
But distraction was inevitable. Dr. David Mirsky was my English professor, and from the myopic perspective of an undergraduate all I knew is that he set a new standard of expression for me. I would not have chosen to spend a year or two on writing and literature, but it has certainly influenced the rest of my life. Somehow there was also time for a stint as a reporter for The Commentator under then editor Murray Laulicht, another place to learn how to express oneself. Succinctly. And finally, my major non science experience of the freshman year was the shiur of R. Weiss. Coming from the boonies (Elizabeth/Newark, New Jersey) this was the majors. Looking for peshat turned out to be a lot tougher than understanding Rolle's Theorem.
But science was the real center of my life (which my wife complains is still the case) and there I had astounding luck. For a brief flicker of time Yeshiva became a serious player in this arena. The now defunct Belfer Graduate School of Science was born a bit before I entered, and phased out some years later. But during my four years I had a fantastic educational experience. Learned a lot more than in my subsequent graduate studies at Princeton. My baptism of fire (if you'll forgive the expression) was an innocent sounding course in Algebra in my sophomore year. OK, it was a graduate course, but algebra? How bad could it be? The instructor was D. J. Newman, with whom I later had contact in his capacity as coach for the Putnam mathematics competition (so I was a varsity player in something). I am nostalgic for that kind of professor. I am nostalgic to BE that sort of professor. Nowadays certain university officials insist that the aim is to make the student a satisfied customer. Not Donald Newman. He marched ahead, and after each two hour lecture I would spend many more hours parsing his words, algebra books before me, trying to master the subject. For the second semester of this experience he needed to sign something to again allow me, an undergraduate, to attend. True to form, he didn't recognize me, although a priest from Fordham and I had gotten the only A's in the course. Which is not to say that some of our instructors weren't both outstanding mathematicians and inspiring teachers: Bernard Epstein comes to mind. I took complex variables with him, but in a real variables course his students were so amused by his constant request, "Give me an epsilon," that for the last lecture of the semester they prepared a large poster with the Greek letter beautifully calligraphed, and presented it to him...GAVE it to him...as a token of his wonderful instruction.
In physics, since this is now my field, I can attest that we had world class scientists as our teachers. For freshman physics I had Joel Lebowitz, now a friend and colleague (and incidentally besides being a leader in the field of statistical mechanics a significant battler for human rights, including, for Jews in Soviet Russia). One of the most original minds in physics is David Finkelstein, with whom I was lucky enough to have my first quantum course. Again this is someone who has become a friend and colleague, but with some special features that befit original minds. At one point he was my guest at the Technion and we made a little party at my house in his honor. The guest of honor of course sat in a big comfortable chair. After the party he left but returned two minutes later. The keys to his car were missing. We turned over the big chair and shook it, but to no avail, and it was only masterful self control that kept me from turning him over. (Ultimately I broke into the car with a coat hanger, but that did not yield keys lying in the floor, and my skills did not extend to hot wiring the engine.) Any of you who has studied quantum mechanics knows that it SHOULD make you worry, that reconciling it with the world you thought you knew is not easy (more of a strain than relativity), so that having Finkelstein to guide us into this intellectual challenge was as good as you could get. I won't try to make my list exhaustive, but it really does go on.
One of the big improvements in college education since my time is what's known as an AREU@Cresearch experience for undergraduates. The real fun of science is the research, and it is easy to go through years and years of study without finding this out. Here too I was lucky. Harry Rauch, another of the math professors, had NSF money which he used to support an undergraduate over the summer. But along research lines, my best experience was with Finkelstein. He gave a general relativity course. As you (should) know, the first and most famous test of this theory was Eddington's measurement of the bending of light around the sun during a 1919 eclipse. (Besides its scientific import this was hailed at the time as a triumph of science over nationalism: a British scientist confirming the theories of a German, shortly after the end of World War I.) It occurred to me while taking this course that light from distant stars or galaxies could bend around other intervening masses, so I estimated the effect, estimated the likelihood of observing this, and did all the things a real scientist would do. This was my term paper, as it were, for Finkelstein, who guided me through it with exemplary comments -and selective silence. This was my first "discovery." I later learned that I had been scooped by Einstein (hence my admiration for Finkelstein's silence), which detracted not at all from the fun. Two comments: today this phenomenon is the basis of Amicrolensing,@ an important tool for discovering and measuring dark matter. And Czech friends have uncovered correspondence from a Jewish engineer in Prague who wrote to Einstein (I think in 1922) proposing this idea.
Another feature and I hope this has not changed, was having talented fellow students. I had been accepted to other schools where (except for those admitted for their parents' donations) the intellectual level was guaranteed to be high. But Yeshiva was a place people went to because they had other priorities, so the fact that Yeshiva was not Princeton nevertheless allowed you to have outstanding classmates. One is now professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University with our last near contact being that we did our miluim in the same communications oriented structure near Tel Aviv. Others were of a similar caliber, although the vagaries of life and the proliferation of scientific specialties have kept their progress from me. And finally not everything does revolve about science, so that some college friendships have lasted a lifetime, although here too, geography is destiny, and living away from the centers has weakened my connections.
Before I entered Yeshiva, a recent graduate, my late cousin Allen told me he had done all his studying after 3 a.m. Of course I discounted this, although Allen was not one to try to make a big impression on his little cousin. It turned out that for me it was 5 a.m. Why? Three to five a.m. was the time that we - I, my roommate(s) and the guys down the hall - solved the big philosophical problems of the day. I hope you're still doing that.
Dr. Larry Schulman, YC '63, did his graduate work at Princeton University and then to faculty positions at Indiana University, the Haifa Technion (where his kids grew up) and now Clarkson University in northern New York.