Eulogy for my father

[veritykindle]

I know I haven't posted here in a long time, but my father died very early on Wednesday morning, and we had the funeral for him today, and I just wanted to save the speech I gave at the funeral.

So here is my eulogy for my father, may he rest in peace.

Comments

[eve11]

Oh, I am so sorry to hear this. Thank you for sharing your tribute. A part of the people we lose does live on (continuity, the mathematician might say), and there is also the part that exists outside of time; the parts that built you up to who you are. The past is untouchable and immutable and true, irrespective of the sense that it seems to get farther away.

He taught me what it means to truly know and understand a subject inside and out, rather than just knowing some of the surface facts about it, and what a difference it makes to your understanding of the world. This is why the world is so much better for teachers and thinkers. It doesn't matter the subject; whether it's a rarefied theory or in the trenches of applications, math or history or whatever. This knowledge is precious, and it lives on in family as I see from your story. And from my experience it lives on too with students who may never have had such role models growing up. I know I didn't, and I am only now understanding the depth that kind of knowledge, learning and guidance has.

I am so sorry for your loss.

[veritykindle]

*hugs* Thank you so much for your kind words!

This is why the world is so much better for teachers and thinkers. It doesn't matter the subject; whether it's a rarefied theory or in the trenches of applications, math or history or whatever.

This is exactly right! I'm so glad to see that what I meant to say really came across, because I feel like this might be one of the most important things I learned from my father.

When my father was very young and just starting out in math, he got a chance to attend some seminars with one of the greatest Russian mathematicians, I M Gelfand, and listening to him talk about mathematics completely transformed the way my father thought about math, because it made him understand what it's like to truly know mathematics, to feel it on a fundamental level. Ever since then, my father has had a very firm belief that it's vitally important for young students who are only starting out in math to spend at least some time with the true experts in the field. He said that even if those aren't truly great teachers, just having a chance to hear the way they think about math, how they make connections between things, can move students to a completely new level of understanding of mathematics.

I never really understood what he meant until a few years ago, when I was taking some statistics class, and was having trouble in it, and ended up talking to my dad about it. Now, my dad has always said that statistics was not his field of expertise. (He said he found it counter-intuitive.) And yet, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I learned more in just a half an hour of talking to him about it than I had in years of statistics classes. Just listening to the way he approached the problems made me realize the connection statistics has to other fields of mathematics, how statistics is a special case of a much wider field of study.

It was a very profound moment for me - that was the moment I truly understood what it's like to truly understand math - that you can approach problems not so much with the just purpose of solving them, but with the purpose of seeing how they fit in with other things, seeing what connections you can make, seeing how all of mathematics fits in together, how pretty much everything in mathematics flows from from just a few fundamental things, and how beautiful that is.

I feel very lucky that I had the chance to make this discovery, and I wish more students had the same chance, as well. It makes me really sad that my father is not around anymore to help people learn it.