by Thane Plambeck
Elwyn Berlekamp was simultaneously one of the kindest, fairest, most-clever and funny and accomplished people I’ve ever met. He was an amazingly creative mathematician and was versatile as an academic leader: he served at different times as Associate Chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and as Chairman of the board of trustees at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. It is not widely known that his books on combinatorial games with Richard K. Guy and the Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays1 had their origins in a series of playful tech reports that Elwyn wrote singlehandedly in the early 1970s as Bell Labs technical reports;2 they can be unearthed in the Stanford math library (and perhaps at UC Berkeley, too).
Here are some particular recollections of how Elwyn handled various types of interactions with people.
(1) When confronted by a rambling person who was familiar with some insignificant flaw or other shortcoming in Elwyn’s research, and who took the opportunity to launch into an impromptu lecture on how Elwyn’s previous work, (or activity on a committee, or whatever) might have been improved:
Elwynian response: “Ah, yes! Tell me more….” This typically had the immediate effect of communicating to his interlocutor that perhaps he should stop talking so as to give Elwyn a chance to reply, and it was like magic — the rambling person would stop for a moment, and Elwyn would take the opportunity to steer the discussion in a more fruitful direction.
(2) When a person made the mistake of confusing, say, milliseconds for microseconds, or megabytes for gigabytes, or some similar mistake: First, Elwyn would offer a gentle correction, and then always would append this follow-up remark: “But what is three orders of magnitude, between friends?”
Thane Plambeck is a Nebraska-born mathematician, computer scientist, and serial software entrepreneur who has lived in Palo Alto, California, since 1985.
