by Arthur E. Ogus
It is a sad but very great honor to attempt to express our Department’s enormous admiration of and appreciation for Shoshichi Kobayashi, a task which I am finding as momentous as any I have yet faced. Kobayashi was a major figure in the history of mathematics and of our department: a stellar colleague and mathematician and a heroic chairman. He had a brilliant career, having been appointed Assistant Professor in 1962 and rising rapidly to the rank of Full Professor by 1966. He was also a very kind man, with a quiet strength and a disarming smile whose company was simultaneously comforting and awe-inspiring. Of course I had heard of him long before I came to Berkeley, and when I arrived I was thrilled to meet him and attend some of his seminars. Sho was chairman of the department from 1978 to 1981, and was very kind with me and others. This was also at the time of the famous “space wars,” when the central campus administration was attempting, by means of obscurantist proclamations, formulas, and calculations, to take a large amount of space away from the math department. Calvin Moore, in his book on the history of our department, says “…through subtle and clever diplomacy, Sho succeeded in holding the loss to about ten percent of the total space… a victory.” I remember it somewhat differently: each time our department received a memo from the administration, Sho would post it in public on the bulletin board, along with a polite but thoroughly devastating rebuttal. This made for enormously amusing reading for members of the department, but was not so amusing for the administration. Sho’s meticulous work revealed to me then the difficulty and complexity of the role of chairman. I deeply wish he were still here to help me with his profound and kind wisdom. When I became chair, I asked him for general advice, based on his time as chair. He warned me not to try to do big things to make a name for myself. If I can do half what he did for our department, I will be very proud.
