NEVILLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-12 published
'He kept a little flame of geometry alive'
Superstar University of Toronto mathematician considered himself
an artist, but his seminal work inevitably found practical applications
By Siobhan
ROBERTS
Saturday,
April 12, 2003 - Page F11
Widely considered the greatest classical geometer of his time
and the man who saved his discipline from near extinction, Harold
Scott MacDonald
COXETER, who died on March 31 at 96, said of
himself, with characteristic modesty, "I am like any other artist.
It just so happens that what fills my mind is shapes and numbers."
Prof. COXETER's work focused on hyperdimensional shapes, specifically
the symmetry of regular figures and polytopes. Polytopes are
geometric shapes of any number of dimensions that cannot be constructed
in the real world and can be visualized only when the eye of
the beholder possesses the necessary insight; they are most often
described mathematically and sometimes can be represented with
hypnotically intricate fine-line drawings.
"I like things that can be seen," Prof.
COXETER once remarked.
"You have to imagine a different world where these queer things
have some kind of shape."
Known as Donald (shortened from MacDonald,) Prof.
COXETER had
such a passion for his work and unrivalled elegance in constructing
and writing proofs that he motivated countless mathematicians
to pick up the antiquated discipline of geometry long after it
had been deemed passé.
John Horton
CONWAY, the Von Neumann professor of mathematics
at Princeton University, never studied under Prof.
COXETER, but
he considers himself an honorary student because of the
COXETERian
nature of his work.
"With math, what you're doing is trying to prove something and
that can get very complicated and ugly.
COXETER always manages
to do it clearly and concisely," Prof.
CONWAY said. "He kept
a little flame of geometry alive by doing such beautiful works
himself.
"I'm reminded of a quotation from Walter Pater's book The Renaissance.
He was describing art and poetry, but he talks of a small, gem-like
flame: 'To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain
this ecstasy, is success in life.' "
Prof. COXETER's oeuvre included more than 250 papers and 12 books.
His Introduction to Geometry, published in 1961, is now considered
a classic -- it is still in print and this year is back on the
curriculum at McGill University. His Regular Polytopes is considered
by some as the modern-day addendum to Euclid's Elements. In 1957,
he published Generators and Relations for Discrete Groups, written
jointly with his PhD student and lifelong friend Willy
MOSER.
It is currently in its seventh edition.
Prof. COXETER's self-image as an artist was validated by his
Friendship with and influence on Dutch artist M. C.
ESCHER, who,
when working on his Circle Limit 3 drawings, used to say, "I'm
Coxetering today."
They met at the International Mathematical Congress in Amsterdam
in 1954 and then corresponded about their mutual interest in
repeating patterns and representations of infinity. In a letter
to his son, Mr.
ESCHER noted that a diagram sent to him by Prof.
COXETER that inspired his Circle Limit 3 prints "gave me quite
a shock."
He added that "
COXETER's hocus-pocus text is no use to me at
all.... I understand nothing, absolutely nothing of it."
While Mr. ESCHER claimed total ignorance of math, Prof.
COXETER
wrote numerous papers on the Dutchman's "intuitive geometry."
Though Prof.
COXETER did geometry for its own sake, his work
inevitably found practical application. Buckminster
FULLER encountered
his work in the construction of his geodesic domes. He later
dedicated a book to Prof.
COXETER: "By virtue of his extraordinary
life's work in mathematics, Prof.
COXETER is the geometer of
our bestirring twentieth century. [He is] the spontaneously acclaimed
terrestrial curator of the historical inventory of the science
of pattern analysis."
Prof. COXETER's work with icosohedral symmetries served as a
template of sorts in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the
Carbon 60 molecule. It has also proved relevant to other specialized
areas of science such as telecommunications, data mining, topology
and quasi-crystals.
In 1968, Prof.
COXETER added to his list of converts an anonymous
society of French mathematicians, the Bourbakis, who actively
and internationally sought to eradicate classical geometry from
the curriculum of math education.
"Death to Triangles, Down with Euclid!" was the Bourbaki war
cry. Prof.
COXETER's rebuttal: "Everyone is entitled to their
opinion. But the Bourbakis were sadly mistaken."
One member of the society, Pierre
CARTIER, met Prof.
COXETER
in Montreal and became enamoured of his work. Soon, he had persuaded
his fellow Bourbakis to include Prof.
COXETER's approach in their
annual publication. "An entire volume of Bourbaki was thoroughly
inspired by the work of
COXETER," said Prof.
CARTIER, a professor
at Denis Diderot University in Paris.
In the 1968 volume, Prof.
COXETER's name was writ large into
the lexicon of mathematics with the inauguration of the terms
"COXETER number," "
COXETER group" and
"COXETER graph."
These concepts describe symmetrical properties of shapes in multiple
dimensions and helped to bridge the old-fashioned classical geometry
with the more au courant and applied algebraic side of the discipline.
These concepts continue to pervade geometrical discourse, several
decades after being discovered by Prof.
COXETER.
Prof. COXETER became a serious mathematician at the relatively
late age of 14, though family folklore has it that, as a toddler,
he liked to stare at the columns of numbers in the financial
pages of his father's newspaper.
He was born into a Quaker family in Kensington, just west of
London, on February 9, 1907. His mother, Lucy
GEE, was a landscape
artist and portrait painter, and his father, Harold, was a manufacturer
of surgical instruments, though his great love was sculpting.
They had originally named their son MacDonald Scott
COXETER,
but a godparent suggested that the boy's father's name should
be added at the front. Another relative then pointed out that
H.M.S. COXETER made him sound like a ship of the royal fleet
so the names were switched around.
When Prof.
COXETER was 12, he created his own language -- "Amellaibian"
a cross between Latin and French, and filled a 126-page notebook
with information on the imaginary world where it was spoken.
But more than anything he fancied himself a composer, writing
several piano concertos, a string quartet and a fugue. His mother
took her son and his musical compositions to Gustav
HOLST.
His
advice: "Educate him first."
He was then sent to boarding school, where he met John Flinders
PETRIE, son of Egyptologist Sir Flinders
PETRIE.
The two were
passing time at the infirmary contemplating why there were only
five Platonic solids -- the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron
and icosahedron. They then began visualizing what these shapes
might look like in the fourth dimension. At the age of 15, Prof.
COXETER won a school prize for an English essay on how to project
these geometric shapes into higher dimensions -- he called it
"Dimensional Analogy."
Prof. COXETER's father took his son along with his essay to meet
friend and fellow pacifist Bertrand
RUSSELL.
Mr.
RUSSELL recommended
Prof. COXETER to mathematician E.H.
NEVILLE, a scout, of sorts,
for mathematics prodigies. He was impressed by Prof.
COXETER's
work but appalled by some inexcusable gaps in his mathematical
knowledge. Prof.
NEVILLE arranged for private tutelage in pursuit
of a scholarship at Cambridge. During this period, Prof.
COXETER
was forbidden from thinking in the fourth dimension, except on
Sundays.
He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926 and was among
five students handpicked by Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN for his philosophy
of mathematics class. During his first year at Cambridge, at
the age of 19, he discovered a new regular polyhedron that had
six hexagonal faces at each vertex.
After graduating with first-class honours in 1929, he received
his doctorate under H. F.
BAKER in 1931, winning the coveted
Smith's Prize for his thesis.
Prof. COXETER did fellowship stints back and forth between Princeton
and Cambridge for the next few years, focusing on the mathematics
of kaleidoscopes -- he had mirrors specially cut and hinged together
and carried them in velvet pouches sewn by his mother. By 1933,
he had enumerated the n-dimensional kaleidoscopes -- that is,
kaleidoscopes operating up to any number of dimensions.
The concepts that became known as
COXETER groups are the complex
algebraic equations he developed to express how many images may
be seen of any object in a kaleidoscope (he once used a paper
triangle with the word "nonsense" printed on it to track reflections).
In 1936, Prof.
COXETER was offered an assistant professorship
at the University of Toronto. He made the move shortly after
the sudden death of his father and following his marriage to
Rien BROUWER.
She was from the Netherlnds and he met her while
she was on holiday in London.
As a professor, Prof.
COXETER was known to flout set curriculum.
Ed BARBEAU, now a professor at the U of T, recalled that at the
start of his classes, Prof.
COXETER would spread out a manuscript
on the desks at the front of the room. During his lecture, he
would often pause for minutes at a time to make notes when a
student offered something that might be relevant to his work
in progress. When the work was later published, students were
pleasantly surprised to find that their suggestions had been
duly credited.
Prof. COXETER was also known to show up to class carrying a pineapple,
or a giant sunflower from his garden, demonstrating the existence
of geometric principles in nature. And he was notorious for leaping
over details, expecting students to fill in the rest.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's resident intellectual, Lister
SINCLAIR, was one of
Prof. COXETER's earliest students. He once recounted that Prof.
COXETER would "write an expression on the board and you could
see it talking to him. It was like Michelangelo walking around
a block of marble and seeing what's in there."
Asia Ivic WEISS, a professor at York University, Prof.
COXETER's
last PhD student and the only woman so honoured, describes an
incident that perfectly exemplifies Prof.
COXETER's math myopia.
Going into labour with her first child, she called him to cancel
their weekly meeting. Prof.
COXETER, who never acknowledged her
pregnancy, said not to worry, he would send over a stack of research
to keep her busy when she got home from the hospital.
Despite several offers from other universities, Prof.
COXETER
stayed at University of Toronto throughout his career.
Like his father, he was a pacifist. In 1997, he was among those
who marched a petition to the university president's office to
protest against an honorary degree being conferred on George
BUSH Sr. Prof.
COXETER recalled with disdain Robert
PRITCHARD's
telling him, "Donald, I have more important things to worry about."
After his official retirement in 1977, Prof.
COXETER continued
as a professor emeritus, making weekly visits to his office.
These subsided only in the past several months. On the weekend
before his death, he finished revisions on his final paper, which
he had delivered the previous summer in Budapest.
In his last five years, he survived a heart attack, a broken
hip (he sprung himself from the hospital early to drive to a
geometry conference in Wisconsin) and, most recently, prostate
cancer.
Considering his 96 years of vegetarianism and a strict exercise
regime, he felt betrayed by his body. "I feel like the man of
Thermopylae who doesn't do anything properly," he commented
recently after an awkward evening out, quoting nonsense poet
Edward LEAR.
Prof. COXETER died in his home, with three long last breaths,
just before bed on the last day of March.
His brain is now undergoing study at McMaster University, along
with that of Albert
EINSTEIN.
Neuroscientist
Sandra
WITELSON
is tryng to determine whether his brain's extraordinary capacities
are associated with its structure.
Prof. COXETER met with her at the beginning of March and learned
that the atypical elements of Einstein's brain, compared with
an average brain, were symmetrical on both right and left sides.
Prof. WITELSON said she wondered whether there might be similar
findings with Prof.
COXETER's brain. "Isn't that nice," he said.
"I suppose that would indicate all my interest in symmetry was
well founded."
Prof. COXETER leaves his daughter Susan and son Edgar. His wife
died in 1999.
Siobhan ROBERTS is a Toronto writer whose biography of Donald
COXETER will be published by Penguin in 2005.
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NEVILLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-06 published
Linda STEARNS: 1937-2003
As ballet mistress and artistic director of the esteemed Montreal
company, she nurtured personality, flair and a risk-taking approach
to dance
By Paula CITRON
Wednesday,
August 6, 2003 - Page R5
In the cutthroat, competitive world of dance, Linda
STEARNS was
an anomaly. As artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens,
she never played games or held grudges. Whether good or bad news,
she bluntly told her dancers what they had to hear, and in return,
her open-door policy allowed them to vent their own feelings.
National
Ballet of Canada artistic director James
KUDELKA, who
spent almost a decade as a member of Les Grands Ballets, likens
her approach to wearing an invisible raincoat upon which unhappy
dancers spewed their venom. At the end of their tirades, she
would serenely remove the garment and say, "Now let's talk."
Linda STEARNS died at her home in Toronto on July 4, at age 65.
She was born into privilege on October 22, 1937. Her father,
Marshal, was an investment broker; her mother, Helen, was heavily
involved in charity work. The family lived in the posh Poplar
Plains area of central Toronto, where Ms.
STEARNS attended Branksome
Hall.
Despite their wealth, the
STEARNS children (Linda, Nora and Marshal)
were expected to earn their own livings. Helen
STEARNS had studied
dance in her youth, but a career was never an option. When eldest
daughter Linda showed a strong talent, history might have repeated
itself had not Marshal Sr. set aside his reservations after seeing
his daughter perform.
After graduating from high school, Ms.
STEARNS went to London
and New York for advanced training. It was the great Alexandra
Danilova, one of Ms.
STEARNS's
New
York teachers, who pointed
the young dancer in the direction of the upstart Les Grands Ballets
Canadiens. Ms.
STEARNS joined Les Grands in 1961, and was promoted
to soloist in 1964. In a Who's Who of Entertainment entry, Ms.
STEARNS was once listed as joining the company in 1861, and she
liked to joke that, at 103 years, she held the record for the
longest time spent in the corps de ballet. In fact, one of Ms.
STEARNS's hallmarks was her sense of humour, much of it at her
own expense.
Les Grands was known for taking dancers who did not necessarily
have perfect ballet bodies, but had personality and flair, a
policy Ms.
STEARNS continued during her own administration.
Although Ms.
STEARNS had very unballetic, low-arched feet, she
was a fine classical dancer. She excelled, however, in the dramatic
repertoire: Mother Courage in Richard Kuch's The Brood, or the
title role in Brydon Paige's Medea. In later years, while teaching
and coaching, Ms.
STEARNS wore high heels to conceal her hated
low arches -- while showing off her attractive ankles.
Her performing career was cut short in 1966 when artistic director
Ludmilla CHIRIAEFF recognized that Ms.
STEARNS would make a brilliant
ballet mistress, and by 1969, Ms.
STEARNS was exclusively in
the studio. In fact, giving up performing was one of the great
disappointments of her life, although she did in time acknowledge
that she had found her true destiny. Ms.
STEARNS's astonishingly
keen eye allowed her to single out, in a corps de ballet of moving
bodies, every limb that was out of position. She could also sing
every piece of music, which saved a lot of time, because she
didn't have to keep putting on the tape recorder. Because of
her intense musicality, Ms.
STEARNS also insisted that the dancers
not just be on the count, but fill every note with movement.
Ms. STEARNS loved playing with words -- she was a crossword-puzzle
addict, for example -- and gave the dancers nicknames, whether
they liked them or not. Catherine
LAFORTUNE was Katrink, Kathy
BIEVER was Little Frog, Rosemary
NEVILLE was Rosie Posie, Betsy
BARON was Boops, and Benjamin
HATCHER was Benjamino, to name
but a few. One who escaped this fate was Gioconda
BARBUTO, simply
because Ms.
STEARNS loved rolling out the word "G-I-O-C-O-N-D-A"
in its full Italian glory. The dancers, in turn, called her Lulubelle,
Mme. Gozonga and
La Stearnova or, if they were feeling tired,
cranky and hostile -- and were out of earshot -- Spoons (for
her non-arched feet) and even less flattering names. As reluctantly
as she became ballet mistress, Ms.
STEARNS became artistic director,
first as one of a triumvirate in 1978 with Danny
JACKSON and
Colin McINTYRE (when Les Grands and Brian
MacDONALD came to an
abrupt parting of the ways;) then with Jeanne
RENAUD in 1985
and finally on her own in 1987. She retired from Les Grands in
1989. Both Mr.
JACKSON and Mr.
McINTRYE still refer to Ms.
STEARNS
as the company's backbone.
These were the famous creative years that included the works
of Mr. KUDELKA, Paul Taylor, Lar Lubovitch, Nacho Duato and George
Balanchine. Les Grands toured the world performing one of the
most exciting and eclectic repertoires in ballet. It was a company
that nurtured dancers and choreographers, many of whom reflected
Ms. STEARNS's risk-taking, innovative esthetic.
She also had time to mentor choreographers outside the company,
including acclaimed solo artist Margie
GILLIS.
Her post-Grands
career included writing assessments for the Canada Council, setting
works on ballet companies, coaching figure skating, and most
recently, becoming ballet mistress for the Toronto-based Ballet
Jörgen. When she was diagnosed with both ovarian and breast cancer
two years ago, she continued her obligations to Ballet Jörgen
until she was no longer able, never letting the dancers know
how ill she was.
Ms. STEARNS loved huge dogs -- or what Ms.
GILLIS refers to as
mountains with fur -- and always had at least two. Her gardens
were magnificent, as was her cooking. Her generosity was legendary,
whether inviting 20 people for Christmas dinner, or hosting the
wedding reception for dancers Andrea
BOARDMAN and Jean-Hugues
ROCHETTE at her tastefully decorated Westmount home. After leaving
Montreal, whether, first, at her horse farm in Harrow, Ontario,
or at the one-room schoolhouse she lovingly renovated near Campbellville,
northwest of Toronto, former colleagues were always welcome.
She continued to keep in touch with her dancers, sending notes
in her beautiful, distinctive handwriting. Her love of sports
never left her, and after a hard day in the studio, she would
relax watching the hockey game. Religion also filled her postdance
life, with Toronto's Anglican Grace-Church-on-the-Hill at its
epicentre. Ms.
STEARNS was very discreet in her private life,
although another disappointment is that neither of two long relationships
resulted in marriage or children.
Ms. STEARNS was always ruthlessly self-critical, always striving
for perfection, never convinced she had rehearsed a work to its
full potential. As a result, she never made herself the centre
of her own story. Her homes, for example, did not contain photographs
glorifying the career of Linda
STEARNS.
Only at the end of her
days, as she faced death with the same grace with which she had
faced life, was she finally able to appreciate how many lives
she had touched, and accept her outstanding achievements with
Les
Grands
Ballets. Linde
HOWE-
BECK, former dance critic for
the Montreal Gazette, sums up Ms.
STEARNS perfectly when she
says that she was all about love -- for her Friends and family,
for life, but most of all, for dance.
Paula CITRON is dance critic for The Globe and Mail.
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NEVILLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-09-20 published
NEVILLE,
David - Born 31 October 1916 in Toronto. Eldest son
of James and Marjorie Law
EAKINS. Lt. Commander Fleet Air Arm,
Overseas Manager Africa, India, Far East. Retired Franklin, Vermont,
U.S.A. Died 12 September 2003 in Montreal
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NEVILLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-16 published
Father figure to the Canadian stage
British-trained Stratford character actor never craved starring
roles
By Allison
LAWLOR,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Thursday, October
16, 2003 - Page R11
For
Mervyn "
Butch"
BLAKE, entering a theatre was a magical experience,
something he never tired of during an acting career that spanned
close to three-quarters of a century. Mr.
BLAKE, one of the most
loved members of the Stratford Festival Company, died on October
9 at a Toronto nursing home after a long illness. He was 95.
"Theatre seems to give me life," Mr.
BLAKE said in 1994. "I just
feel marvellous when I enter the theatre... it's one of the things
which keeps me going."
Over his long stage life that included 42 consecutive seasons
with the Stratford Festival of Canada, Mr.
BLAKE "had the distinction
of playing in every single play of Shakespeare's," said Richard
MONETTE,
Stratford's artistic director.
"He had a great life in the theatre," Mr.
MONETTE said.
Adored by both audiences and fellow actors, the veteran actor
was known across Canada for his enormous talent and generosity
of spirit. When he wasn't working at Stratford, he acted on the
country's major stages and in television and film.
For seven seasons, he toured with the Canadian Players, bringing
professional theatre to smaller towns. And in 1987, he won a
Dora Mavor Moore Award for best performance in a featured role
in a production of Saturday, Sunday, Monday at what was then
called CentreStage (now CanStage).
"Everyone loved Butch without exception," said John
NEVILLE,
a former Stratford's artistic director.
Mervyn BLAKE was born on November 30, 1907, in Dehra Dun, India,
where his father was a railway executive.
His father wanted him to become an engineer but after falling
in love with the theatre, Mr.
BLAKE was able to persuade his
father to allow him to study at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art. In 1932, he graduated and soon made his professional stage
debut at the Embassy Theatre in London
During the Second World War, he served in the British Army as
a driver. It was during the war years that he is said to have
got his nickname Butch. A witness to the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp, Mr.
BLAKE was present at the liberation of
the camp by British troops. It was an experience that haunted
him for the rest of his life.
At the war's end, he returned to England and to the stage. He
married actress Christine
BENNETT and spent the years between
1952 and 1955 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
There he worked with many of the great British actors such as
Sir Laurence
OLIVIER, Sir Michael
REDGRAVE and Dame Peggy
ASHCROFT.
Despite his success on the British stage, he decided to join
the Stratford Festival of Canada, then in its fifth season. With
his family in tow, Mr.
BLAKE moved to Canada and in 1957 appeared
in a production of Hamlet with Christopher
PLUMMER in the title
role.
"He wasn't a leading actor," said actor and director Douglas
CAMPBELL. "He was a supporting player. As a supporting player
you couldn't get better."
Mr. BLAKE always saw himself as a character actor who never cared
that much about starring roles, said Audrey
ASHLEY, a former
Ottawa
Citizen theatre critic and author of Mr.
BLAKE's 1999
biography With Love from Butch.
"He was one of those actors you never had to worry about," Ms.
ASHLEY said. "You knew Butch was always going to do a good job."
Known for his unfailing good nature and even temper, he enjoyed
re-telling gaffes he had made on stage. Mr.
MONETTE remembers
one performance where Mr.
BLAKE appeared on stage as the Sea
Captain in Twelfth Night. The character Viola asks him, "What
country, Friends, is this?" And instead of responding "This is
Illyria, lady." Out of his mouth popped, "This is Orillia."
To the younger actors at Stratford, Mr.
BLAKE was a father figure.
"He was very fond of the young actors and would take them under
his wing," Ms.
ASHLEY said.
Stephen RUSSELL remembers arriving at Stratford for his first
season in the mid-1970s. He was placed in the same dressing room
as Mr. BLAKE, an experience he still holds close to his heart.
"He was one of the most generous human beings," Mr.
RUSSELL said.
One of the areas Mr.
BLAKE was most helpful in was teaching fellow
actors how to apply stage makeup. He loved makeup and on his
dressing-room table he had an old rabbit's foot that he would
use to apply his face powder, Mr.
RUSSELL said.
Aging didn't stop him from applying his own elaborate makeup.
Playing the role of old Adam in As You Like It required him to
go through the same makeup ritual when he was 70 years old as
it did when he performed the role years earlier as a much younger
man.
Aside from the stage, one of Mr.
BLAKE's passions was cricket.
During his first season in Stratford, he played on the festival's
team and was responsible for starting a friendly, annual cricket
match against the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Each season, members of the two acting companies would come together
for a civilized afternoon of cricket and tea. The Stratford team
still goes by the name of Blake's Blokes.
In honour of his talent and dedication to the theatre, Mr.
BLAKE
was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in May, 1995.
"When he entered, the stage just lit up," Mr.
RUSSELL said.
Mr. BLAKE leaves his wife
Christine
BENNETT; children Andrew
and Bridget; and stepson Tim
DAVISSON.
Details of a memorial service to be held in Stratford, Ontario,
have yet to be announced.
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NEVILLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-17 published
A true hero of Canadian science
Professor who won 1994 Nobel Prize didn't think his work was
very important but had to change his mind after he got award
By Allison
LAWLOR,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail Friday, October
17, 2003 - Page R13
Canadian physicist Bertram
BROCKHOUSE once likened winning the
Nobel Prize to winning the Stanley Cup.
Dr. BROCKHOUSE, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1994
for his work developing a technique to measure the atomic structure
of matter, died on Monday in a Hamilton hospital. He was 85.
After the prize announcement, the visibly abashed emeritus professor
of physics at McMaster University told reporters in Hamilton
that when the Swedish Academy of Science telephoned him at 6: 45
a.m. his reaction was "enormous astonishment."
"It came as a complete surprise," he said. "I would have otherwise
been dressed and ready."
He said at the time he was unaware he had been nominated.
Aside from his own personal achievement, Dr.
BROCKHOUSE is the
only Canadian Nobel laureate who was born, educated and completed
his life's work in this country.
Dr. BROCKHOUSE shared his Nobel prize with Clifford
SHULL, a
former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who died in 2001 at the age of 85. They were honoured for research
conducted at the first nuclear reactors in Canada and the United
States as early as the 1940s and 1950s.
In announcing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy said "Clifford
SHULL helped answer the question of where atoms 'are' and Bertram
N. BROCKHOUSE the question of what atoms 'do.'
Much of Dr.
BROCKHOUSE's award-winning work was carried on at
the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, a facility operated by
what is now called Atomic Energy of Canada, where he was a researcher
from 1950 until 1962. The original Chalk River reactor, located
190 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, drew curious scientists from
around the globe in the 1950s. Dr.
BROCKHOUSE used the neutron
beams from the nuclear reactors to probe materials at the atomic
level. Using a device he built for his research, known as the
triple-axis neutron spectrometer, he is recognized for improving
the understanding of the way neutrons bounce off atomic nuclei.
His triple-axis neutron spectrometer is still used around the
world and parts of the original device he built are still at
Chalk
River, said Dr. Bruce
GAULIN, who holds the Brockhouse
Chair in the physics of materials at McMaster.
Dr. BROCKHOUSE worked with simple materials like aluminum and
steel. Today the technique he developed, known as neutron scattering,
is used in widely differing areas such as the study of superconductors,
elastic properties of polymers and virus structure.
Scientists had previously relied on radiation from devices like
X-rays to look at the atomic structure of matter. "He is a heroic
figure," Dr.
GAULIN said.
Described as competitive in his scientific endeavours, Dr.
BROCKHOUSE
didn't want to miss a single minute. A colleague at Chalk River
once asked him why he worked so hard. "Every minute of every
day is unique," he replied. "And once that minute is gone, it
is lost forever."
While he had little spare time during his years at Chalk River,
he did use opportunities to take part in a number of amateur
dramatic productions, including three operettas. A great lover
of music, particularly for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan,
Dr. BROCKHOUSE was known for loudly singing excerpts while working
on experiments.
Bertram Neville
BROCKHOUSE was born on July 15, 1918, in Lethbridge,
Alberta. "My first memories are of a farm near Milk River where
I lived with my mother and father and my sister, Alice Evelyn,
and a variety of farm and domestic animals," he wrote in an autobiographical
sketch for the academy.
His parents Israel Bertram
BROCKHOUSE and Mable Emily
(NEVILLE)
BROCKHOUSE had two other children. One son died in infancy and
another went on to become a railroad civil engineer. The family
moved to Vancouver while Dr.
BROCKHOUSE was still a young boy.
He completed high school in 1935 and instead of going to university
went to work as a laboratory assistant and then as a radio repairman.
When the Second World War came along he used his radio skills
as an electronics technician in the Royal Canadian Navy. He spent
some months at sea, but most of his war years were spent servicing
sonar equipment at a shore base.
After the war, he returned to Vancouver to attend university
at the University of British Columbia. He later went to the University
of Toronto where he completed his PhD in 1950 with a lofty thesis
entitled "The Effect of Stress and Temperature upon the Magnetic
Properties of Ferromagnetic Materials".
In 1962, Dr.
BROCKHOUSE joined the department of physics at McMaster
University and remained there until his retirement in 1984. He
and his wife Doris raised their six children in Ancaster, a small
community outside Hamilton, in a house they occupied for close
to 40 years.
At the university, Dr.
BROCKHOUSE was highly regarded as a professor
known for having high expectations of his students and for most
often being deep in thought.
"You had the sense you were in the presence of an unusual person,"
said Dr. Tom
TIMUSK, an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy
at McMaster.
Dr. TIMUSK, who shared an office with Dr.
BROCKHOUSE at McMaster
for some time, said his colleague jokingly told students after
he won the Nobel Prize that he didn't think his work was very
important but that had to change his mind after he got the award.
"I think he genuinely believed that what he did was good work,
but not so important," Dr.
GAULIN said.
Dr. BROCKHOUSE likened himself to an explorer who woke up on
any given morning not knowing exactly what he was going to do,
except follow some vague instinct about what should be explored
next.
He also liked to say that scientists were really just mapmakers
with a greater eye for detail. "The metaphor that I think of
is that of the atlas you're all familiar with. What we work on
in basic science is just a bigger atlas, with places and objects
and so on that are not as familiar."
Dr. BROCKHOUSE leaves his wife, children Ann, Gordon, Ian, Beth,
Charles and James, and 10 grandchildren.
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