Celebratio Mathematica

I re­mem­ber meet­ing El­wyn Ber­lekamp.

It was at a Gath­er­ing For Gard­ner (G4G) meet­ing in At­lanta, Geor­gia, (as they have all been — so far). He was in a group of people that was chat­ting, and it was some time be­fore I real­ised just who he was. I was already aware of a few of the amaz­ing things he had done, and so was quietly pleased to be in a con­ver­sa­tion group that in­cluded him. We didn’t chat with each oth­er — it was still some years be­fore that would hap­pen. But we were co-loc­ated, and that was a bit of a buzz for me.

It turns out that this wasn’t un­usu­al. I can’t say that I knew him well, but my per­son­al ex­per­i­ence was that he was quiet, but gen­er­ous. You can read about some of the ex­traordin­ary work that he did by look­ing him up on the web, and I won’t go in­to that here. Suf­fice to say that my signed copy of Win­ning Ways is one of my treas­ured pos­ses­sions.

So you can read on­line about the Ber­lekamp–Welch al­gorithm and the Ber­lekamp–Mas­sey al­gorithms which are used to im­ple­ment Reed–So­lomon er­ror cor­rect­ing codes, which are used every­where from DVDs to get­ting im­ages back from space. I won’t re­peat that here. In­stead, I’ll tell you a story.

When I at­tend G4G I al­ways try to ar­rive on Tues­day af­ter­noon, even though the event doesn’t start till the Wed­nes­day even­ing. Part of this is to al­low for hic­coughs and delays in travel, part is to let me get settled after the jour­ney, but mostly it’s be­cause many of the people I know and who I only get to see every two years also ar­rive early, so we get some time to hang out.

One par­tic­u­lar G4G I saw someone hanging back, watch­ing us all talk and play with puzzles, so I wandered over and asked if they were there for G4G. “Yes!” came the reply, so I brought them over, poin­ted out some of the people in the group, and said that when they were ready to join in, they would be wel­come.

“Is Ber­lekamp here?” I was asked. “I really want to have a game of Go with him.”

“I don’t think he’s here yet, al­though he’s likely to turn up to­mor­row. And just go and talk to him. When the time is right, ask for a game.”

I don’t know if he did that, but a day or two later when I saw El­wyn I said that there was a young lad who wanted a game with him. The reply was “That can prob­ably hap­pen.”

It was only later that I found out what did hap­pen.

One of the sub-events at most G4Gs was an af­ter­noon at Tom Rodgers’ house. Those del­eg­ates par­ti­cip­at­ing in that sub-event were usu­ally taken after lunch by bus where there was the op­por­tun­ity of wan­der­ing around the amaz­ing gar­dens, tak­ing part in a quiz, or Math­em­at­ic­al Sculp­ture Build­ing, and then a meal, all while spend­ing time with some of the oth­er del­eg­ates. My young friend was sup­posed to be there, al­though I didn’t see him, and neither did I see El­wyn.

But they were there.

El­wyn hadn’t taken the bus. In­stead he’d taken a taxi down­town and bought a Go set. He’d then con­tin­ued on to Tom’s house, and had a game with my young friend. At the end of the game El­wyn turned the board over, signed it, and gave the set to him.

That was El­wyn Ber­lekamp.

Colin Wright is a co-founder (with An­drew Lipson) of Solypsis Lim­ited and holds a Ph.D. from Cam­bridge Uni­versity in Com­bin­at­or­ics and Graph The­ory.