Jaime Escalante, Inspiration for a Movie

Warner Brothers, via Associated Press - Jaime Escalante, right, and the actor who portrayed him in the 1988 hit movie “Stand and Deliver,” Edward James Olmos.

March 31, 2010
Jaime Escalante, Inspiration for a Movie, Dies at 79
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Jaime Escalante, the high school teacher whose ability to turn out high-achieving calculus students from a poor Hispanic neighborhood in East Los Angeles inspired the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver,” with Edward James Olmos in the starring role, died Tuesday at his son’s home in Rosedale, Calif. He was 79 and lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The cause was pulmonary arrest brought on by pneumonia, his son Jaime said.

Mr. Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant, used unconventional techniques to explain mathematical problems and to convince his students at James A. Garfield High School, known for its dismal test scores and high drop-out rate, that they could compete with students from wealthier schools. Rock ’n’ roll records played at full blast, remote-controlled toys and magic tricks were all brought into play.

“Calculus need not be made easy,” read one of the motivational signs in Mr. Escalante’s classroom. “It is easy already.”

In 1982, 18 students in the special calculus program that Mr. Escalante had created at Garfield four years earlier took the College Board’s advanced placement test in calculus. Seven of them received a 5, the highest possible score; the rest, a 4.

Officials at the company administering the test suspected cheating and asked 14 students to take the exam again. A dozen did, and their performance validated the original results.

Mr. Olmos’s performance in “Stand and Deliver” earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor and turned Mr. Escalante into an educational hero. The year of the film, Henry Holt published “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” by Jay Mathews.

“He was working with a group of students who did not have much in life,” said Erika T. Camacho, who took algebra with Mr. Escalante and now teaches mathematics at Arizona State University. “They were told that they were not good enough and would not amount to much. He told them that with desire and discipline, they could do anything.”

Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutiérrez was born on Dec. 31, 1930, in La Paz, where his parents were elementary school teachers. He taught physics and mathematics there for several years before political unrest led him to emigrate with his family to the United States in 1963.

In addition to his son Jaime, Mr. Escalante is survived by his wife, Fabiola, another son, Fernando, of Elk Grove, Calif., and six grandchildren.

While attending Pasadena College, where he earned an associate degree in arts in 1969, Mr. Escalante worked as a busboy in a coffee shop and as a cook. He later found work testing computers at the Burroughs Corporation while studying mathematics at California State University in Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1973.

After receiving his teacher’s certificate from Cal State in 1974, he began teaching at Garfield. The events telescoped into a single year in “Stand and Deliver” unfolded over a much longer time. Beginning with five calculus students in 1978, Mr. Escalante developed a program that eventually attracted hundreds of students keen to go on to college. In 1988, 443 students took the College Board’s advanced placement test; 266 passed.

Success, acclaim and the celebrity status that came with “Stand and Deliver” brought strife. Mr. Escalante butted heads with the school’s administration and fellow teachers, some jealous of his fame, others worried that he was creating his own fief. The teacher’s union demanded that his oversubscribed calculus classes be brought down in size.

In 1991, Mr. Escalante left Garfield to teach at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento. Without him, Garfield’s calculus program withered. In 2001 he retired and returned to Bolivia.

Mr. Escalante always impressed on his students the importance of “ganas” — desire. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he once told his class. “I’ll teach you math, and that’s your language. You’re going to go to college and sit in the first row, not in the back, because you’re going to know more than anybody.”

Math giant

Israel M. Gelfand as a professor of mathematics at Rutgers.

October 8, 2009
Israel Gelfand, Math Giant, Dies at 96
By KENNETH CHANG

Israel M. Gelfand, one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics, whose work cleared paths for other thinkers in fields as diverse as physics and medical imaging, died on Monday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 96.

The death, at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Tatiana.

Dr. Gelfand did not achieve fame from attacking and solving famous, intractable problems. Instead, he was a pioneer in untrodden mathematical fields, laying the foundation and creating tools for others to use.

“People always compare him with great mathematicians like Euler or Hilbert or Poincaré,” said Vladimir Retakh, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers, where Dr. Gelfand spent most of his time as a visiting professor after leaving the Soviet Union in 1989.

Dr. Retakh said Vladimir Arnold, a prominent Russian mathematician, had contrasted the approaches of the Soviet Union’s two most famous mathematicians — Dr. Gelfand and Andrei Kolmogorov, who was Dr. Gelfand’s thesis adviser — with a travel analogy.

“Suppose they both arrived in a country with a lot of mountains,” Dr. Retakh said of Dr. Arnold’s comparison. “Kolmogorov would immediately try to climb the highest mountain. Gelfand would immediately start to build roads.”

Dr. Gelfand’s pioneering work in a highly abstract field known as representation theory has proven crucial for physicists working with quantum mechanics. “It’s kind of the main language people use there,” said Andrei Zelevinsky, a professor of mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston.

Later work in another field, integral geometry, seemingly just as abstract and obscure, is now used to turn the raw data of M.R.I.’s and CAT scans into three-dimensional images. “This turned out to be a mathematical apparatus crucial for tomography,” Dr. Zelevinsky said. “You need rather deep mathematics to do that.”

Dr. Retakh said, “He was probably the last of the greatest who worked in almost every area of mathematics.”

Dr. Gelfand also recruited talented mathematicians as students and collaborators, many of whom also achieved prominence. At Moscow State University, where he taught for decades, he held a legendary weekly series of math seminars that, instead of typical invited prepared talks, sometimes unfolded more like math improv.

“He’s probably the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” said Alexander B. Goncharov, a professor of mathematics at Brown University and one of Dr. Gelfand’s students. “Unpredictable and very wise.”

Dr. Retakh said that what a typical day’s seminar would cover would not be known until it started, often with conversations before the seminar leading to Dr. Gelfand’s choosing an impromptu speaker and an impromptu topic. “The joke was: ‘We cannot tell what will be at the seminar. We can tell what it will not be. What it will not be is the talk that was announced,’ ” Dr. Retakh said.

For the speaker, it could be a difficult challenge, stretching for several hours, with Dr. Gelfand interrupting with questions, observations and sometimes cutting remarks. “He was not the most delicate, polite person in the world,” Dr. Zelevinsky said.

But for the speaker and the attendees, the sessions also provided valuable insight into Dr. Gelfand’s thinking.

He started a second seminar series, on biology, after leukemia struck one of his sons, Aleksandr. “The best Moscow biologists were happy to come and attend this seminar and give talks and hear very unusual opinion,” said Simon Gindikin, a colleague at Rutgers.

Aleksandr succumbed to leukemia, but Dr. Gelfand continued work in biology, Dr. Retakh said.

Born in Ukraine near Odessa, Israel Moiseevich Gelfand never finished high school. He never attended college as an undergraduate. Dr. Gelfand went to Moscow when he was 16 or 17, working at odd jobs. Already interested in mathematics, he attended seminars, and at the age of 19, he was admitted directly into graduate school at Moscow State University, studying under Kolmogorov.

Dr. Gelfand completed his ordinary doctorate in 1935 and then a higher doctor of mathematics degree in 1940.

As a Jew, Dr. Gelfand was pushed out of a position at the prestigious Steklov Institute and then out of a full-time professorship at Moscow University. He then ended up at the Institute of Applied Mathematics. He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1953, but only as a second-tier corresponding member, and did not receive full membership in the academy until 1984.

In 1989, Dr. Gelfand left the Soviet Union for the United States. He spent a year at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until obtaining a position at Rutgers, where he resumed his seminar series on a smaller scale for several years.

Dr. Gelfand’s awards include membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in Britain, and a MacArthur grant in 1994.

An earlier marriage, to Zorya Shapiro, ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife, Tatiana, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Sergei, of Providence, R.I., and Vladimir, of Chicago; a daughter, Tatiana, of Jersey City; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Gelfand, who often said, “You have to be fast only to catch fleas,” sought to teach not only the rules of math, but also the beauty and exactness of the field.

“Mathematics is a way of thinking in everyday life,” Dr. Gelfand said in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. “It is important not to separate mathematics from life. You can explain fractions even to heavy drinkers. If you ask them, ‘Which is larger, 2/3 or 3/5?’ it is likely they will not know. But if you ask, ‘Which is better, two bottles of vodka for three people, or three bottles of vodka for five people?’ they will answer you immediately. They will say two for three, of course.”

Math Theorist Who Clashed With Soviets

Michael Marsland/Yale University, 1992 - Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro

March 5, 2009
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, Math Theorist Who Clashed With Soviets, Dies at 79
By KENNETH CHANG

Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, whose outstanding mathematical contributions stretched over a long career despite hardships as a Jew in the Soviet Union and later the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease, died Feb. 21 in Tel Aviv. He was 79.

His death was announced last week by Yale University, where he was a professor of mathematics.

Working with James W. Cogdell, his main collaborator over a quarter-century, starting in the mid-1970s, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro shaped a proof of what is known as the Converse Theorem, which finds some deep relationships between different fields of mathematics.

The mathematical constructs are “quite mysterious, even to mathematicians,” Dr. Cogdell explained in an interview this week. But the theorem has wide applications, including playing a small but important role in the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem that Andrew Wiles, a Princeton mathematician, completed in 1994.

“It’s a very powerful tool,” said Peter C. Sarnak, a professor of mathematics at Princeton. “He made sure it’s in a form everyone can use it.”

Born in Moscow, Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro became interested in mathematics when he was 10. In a memoir, he said that when he learned about negative numbers from his father, a chemical engineer, he was struck “by the charm and unusual beauty” of the concept.

After completing his undergraduate degree in 1951 at Moscow University, he wanted to continue there for his graduate studies. Despite the strong recommendation of Alexander O. Gelfond, a prominent mathematician and member of the Communist Party, the application was rejected.

“That was a time of great anti-Semitism,” said Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro’s son, Gregory.

Through Gelfond’s efforts, he was admitted to the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. But in 1952, he received a letter from government officials ordering him to go to Kazakhstan to teach high school. His parents, fearing that he might be sent to Stalin’s labor camps if he refused, told him to go, but he decided not to. After about a year, another letter informed him he did not have to report for the teaching assignment.

During this time, he produced a proof that asserts that certain sequences of integers defined through the power function contain an infinite number of prime numbers. “It was rather unexpected,” Dr. Sarnak said.

Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro received his doctorate in 1954.

Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro also attended seminars at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, where Prof. Igor Shafarevich influenced his interests toward modern number theory and algebraic geometry.

In 1958, he became a professor of mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Applied Mathematics, and in 1965, he gained an additional professorship at Moscow State University.

Except for a short trip to Hungary, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. The authorities told him that he would be free to travel if he joined the Communist Party.

He responded that party membership would distract him from his work.

In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union let more Jews emigrate to Israel, including Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro’s first wife, Inna, whom he had divorced, and his son. In 1974, he also applied for an exit visa, but was denied. He lost his job at the Institute of Applied Mathematics, and even his access to mathematical libraries.

In 1976, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro finally received an exit visa. That broke up his second marriage, as his wife remained in Moscow.

Starting in 1977, he divided his time as a professor between Tel Aviv University and Yale.

When Dr. Cogdell was a graduate student at Yale, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro became his thesis adviser. As part of the oral examination, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro assigned him some assertions to prove.

Dr. Cogdell, now a professor at Ohio State, recalled that he thought he had found the solutions.

“Then I realized there was a mistake,” Dr. Cogdell said. “His response was, ‘Very good.’ Then I said, ‘I know how to fix it,’ and he said, ‘Even better.’ ”

Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro is survived by his wife, Edith Piatetski-Shapiro, who lives in New Haven and Tel Aviv; his son, Gregory, of Brookline, Mass.; a daughter, Shelly Shapiro of New York City; a stepdaughter, Niki Lipkin of Tel Aviv; and two grandsons.

As the Parkinson’s worsened, Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro relied on others to record notes and he had more trouble talking. In 1992, he decided to stop traveling, but a year or two later, he changed his mind. “He missed all of the contact and finally decided he wouldn’t feel better if he traveled or not,” Dr. Cogdell said.

His third wife, Edith, a mathematician he had met in Israel, and others helped him walk. His speech fell to a whisper and often he could not talk at all.

For a number of years, when Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro was in a good state, he would phone Dr. Cogdell, and it would be a three-way conversation with Edith repeating Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro’s words to Dr. Cogdell and then handing the phone to Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro as Dr. Cogdell replied.

One of the highest honors in mathematics is to be invited to lecture at the International Congress of Mathematics, held only once every four years, and Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro was invited to speak four times, in 1962, 1966, 1978 and 2002, when he was in his 70s and still “knocking off well-known, longstanding problems,” said Dr. Sarnak, the professor at Princeton.

Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro was able to deliver the lecture in person twice — in 1966 in Moscow, and in 1978, after he had immigrated to Israel. For the first two invitations, the Soviet Union did not allow him to leave the country and colleagues delivered his speeches for him; the last time, he was too tired to attend, and the address was delivered by Dr. Cogdell.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 18, 2009
An obituary on March 5 about the mathematician Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro misstated the timing of and reason for the loss of his position at Moscow State University. It took place in 1968, when he signed a petition in support of a dissident colleague, not in the early 1970s, after his son emigrated to Israel. The obituary also referred incorrectly to his participation in the International Congress of Mathematics, held every four years. Besides lecturing at the congress in 1978, he also delivered a lecture at the 1966 congress, held in Moscow; he did not deliver a lecture in person only once.