Celebratio Mathematica

Yasha re­marked in his in­ter­view for this volume that, com­ing to Pa­lo Alto, he “had this feel­ing that all my pre­vi­ous life was un­der dark clouds, and sud­denly I had the sun.” As his stu­dent at Stan­ford, I basked not only in the sun­light from the sky but the sun­light he provided. I sus­pect the same is true for oth­ers lucky enough to be in Yasha’s sphere. As Miguel Ab­reu said, “With Yasha, every day was a good day.”

Dur­ing my ini­tial phase of work­ing with Yasha, I would ar­rive at his of­fice weekly, beaten-down and em­bar­rassed at not hav­ing ac­com­plished much of any­thing that week. But I would leave on a high, elated and em­boldened. How? Each meet­ing, upon learn­ing of my lack of pro­gress, Yasha would quickly launch in­to an en­er­get­ic ex­pos­i­tion of ideas he thought I might like — a per­son­al­ized lec­ture that was, in es­sence, a fish­ing ex­ped­i­tion. Week after week, with in­fin­ite pa­tience and un­flag­ging, in­fec­tious en­thu­si­asm, Yasha would go fish­ing, lure after lure (Stein man­i­folds, Le­gendri­an knots, con­tact struc­tures, pseudo­holo­morph­ic curves, sin­gu­lar­ity the­ory, etc.), un­til something caught. Miguel and I were Yasha’s fourth and fifth stu­dents in the United States, after Eric Zeisel, Sergei Makar-Li­man­ov, and Maia Fraser, who had been work­ing on Stein man­i­folds, con­tact struc­tures, and Le­gendri­an knots, re­spect­ively. Miguel grav­it­ated to pseudo­holo­morph­ic curves. I ended up work­ing on sym­plect­ic cut-and-paste tech­niques. Mean­while, Yasha mused that one thing he liked very much about con­tact geo­metry was that no one else was work­ing on it, so he could take his time, with no pres­sure. Well, that didn’t last!

Once I had a dir­ec­tion for my thes­is, I set out to un­der­stand rel­ev­ant pa­pers. When I shared with Yasha that I was hav­ing great dif­fi­culty read­ing pa­pers, he said, “So don’t read. Just do your work.” This turned out to be very wise ad­vice, al­low­ing me to de­vel­op my own per­spect­ive. And he was care­ful to not in­ter­fere with that de­vel­op­ment. I re­call a siz­able num­ber of our weekly meet­ings that con­sisted of me mak­ing a claim and ex­plain­ing why it must be true — in spite of the claim dir­ectly con­tra­dict­ing what I had ex­plained the week be­fore. Yasha gave me his full at­ten­tion, but must have kept his think­ing at enough of a dis­tance to let my struggles be fully mine. That said, he was un­equi­voc­ally sup­port­ive throughout, and has been ever since. Yasha has a re­mark­able, quiet way of sup­port­ing his stu­dents as people via con­ver­sa­tion about math­em­at­ics.

As my gradu­ation date ap­proached, I ap­plied for an NSF postdoc. Yasha had read and ap­proved of the es­say in that ap­plic­a­tion. Af­ter­ward, Lisa Traynor ad­vised me that I should strengthen the be­gin­ning. I showed Yasha the re­vi­sion. Right away, Yasha, whom I had nev­er heard say any­thing neg­at­ive, blur­ted out, “I hate it!” I laughed! It was clas­sic Yasha: he found the be­gin­ning self-pro­mot­ing. I ap­pre­ci­ated his aver­sion but de­cided the ex­plan­a­tion was ap­pro­pri­ate for the audi­ence. I kept the para­graph and got the postdoc — be­cause of years of Yasha’s tu­tel­age.

Mar­garet Sym­ing­ton re­ceived her Ph.D. in 1996. After a postdoc at the Uni­versity of Texas, a vis­it­ing po­s­i­tion at the Uni­versity of Illinois, and four years as an as­sist­ant pro­fess­or at Geor­gia Tech, she settled at the un­der­gradu­ate-only Col­lege of Lib­er­al Arts and Sci­ences at Mer­cer Uni­versity in Ma­con, GA. Dur­ing most of her two dec­ades at Mer­cer, her teach­ing has in­cluded writ­ing in­struc­tion in the con­text of in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary courses and su­per­vi­sion of in­de­pend­ent study and un­der­gradu­ate re­search in math­em­at­ics.