by Yakov Eliashberg
My first interaction, which I remember, with Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs was in 1969 at a mathematical school at Tsaghkadzor, Armenia. I was then a student at Leningrad University, and this was my first mathematical meeting. Dmitry Borisovich gave a memorable series of lectures at the school. In fact, I had seen D.B. much earlier, in 1963, at a ceremony in Moscow, where he was announcing winners of the all-union school math olympiad. But this was, of course, a one-direction encounter.
Dmitry Borisovich was working for several years with my PhD advisor Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin on their book Beginner’s Course in Topology.1 I remember, that at the beginning of summer in 1972 I came to Ust’-Narva (now Narva-Jõesuu) in Estonia to see V. A. Rokhlin, who stayed there for the summer. D.B. was living with the Rokhlins, as they were working with V.A. on their book (and D.B. was painting in his spare time). I remember walking with them for several hours while they argued about a title for one of the book’s chapters.
As we became friends, Dmitry Borisovich several times invited me and my wife Ada to stay with him when we were visiting Moscow from Leningrad and Syktyvkar. Both of us, Ada and I, enjoyed staying with the Fuchses, meeting with his father Boris Abramovich and mother Ekaterina Ivanovna and later with his wife Ira and reading at night books from their fantastic library.
It was always great to discuss mathematics with D.B. One of the subjects we both were very interested in at the time was foliations, and I learned from him a great deal. In 1978 I came several times to Moscow to explain to D.B. my proof of Arnold’s fixed point conjecture for surfaces. D.B. also invited his friend Andrei Leontovich to participate in this three-person seminar.
D.B. spent his first (academic) year in America as a visiting professor at Stanford. He came with his wife, Ira, and daughters, Katya and Lyalya. For almost the whole year they did not have a car, and went around everywhere on bicycles. Sometime close to the end of the year Peter Sarnak, who was leaving from Stanford to Princeton, left them his big old American car. They were very happy finally to have greater freedom to move around, and drove to the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, there are some hills in between Stanford and the Ocean. The car didn’t like the hills and blew up. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Some time later they bought a new (small) car, which served them fine, but, in the words of one of my colleagues, “nicely fit on them”.
Our department secretary Karen very much liked D.B. and was also impressed by his size. When a little bit later I brought to the department Helmut Hofer, who is also not a small person, Karen noted: “Yasha likes big mathematicians”. After spending a year at Stanford, D.B. moved for a permanent position to UC Davis. Dmitry Borisovich and Ira bought a house there and mentioned to us that there was a lime tree growing in their garden. A little bit later they corrected that: the tree turned out to be a lemon, not a lime. As time went on, this tree progressed to being an orange, and then ended up a grapefruit. Even citrus tried to be bigger near Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs!
Yakov Eliashberg is the Herald L. and Caroline L. Ritch Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. His main work belongs to symplectic and contact geometry and topology.
