Celebratio Mathematica

I am very for­tu­nate to have had Pro­fess­or Shoshi­chi Kobay­ashi as my teach­er, ment­or, and ad­visor. He was in­stru­ment­al in my work as a math­em­atician, and I am grate­ful for his sup­port and en­cour­age­ment throughout my ca­reer.

My fath­er left Korea to study in the US in 1954 right after the Korean War. He left the rest of his fam­ily of four: a wife and three chil­dren. After sev­en years of sep­ar­a­tion, he brought his fam­ily to the US I had just fin­ished high school and a semester of col­lege in Seoul, Korea, and I found my­self en­rolled in San Fran­cisco State Col­lege un­able to com­mu­nic­ate in a for­eign cul­ture. I found that I en­joyed study­ing cal­cu­lus text­books. I trans­ferred to Berke­ley, get­ting a BA de­gree in math­em­at­ics in 1965, and then entered in­to the gradu­ate pro­gram at Berke­ley. I still felt so­cially un­com­fort­able, as my lan­guage skills were not much im­proved. In ad­di­tion, only one or two girls were in math­em­at­ics courses. It was a pleas­ant sur­prise that I passed the qual­i­fy­ing ex­am­in­a­tion in 1967. I met Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi and some­how felt com­fort­able with him and had enough cour­age to ask him to be my thes­is ad­visor.

With his usu­al warmth and un­der­stand­ing nature, Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi was able to make me feel at ease dur­ing vis­its to his of­fice to learn and ask ques­tions about math­em­at­ics. He in­tro­duced me to the con­cepts of hy­per­bol­ic man­i­folds. He sug­ges­ted the prob­lem of ex­tend­ing the clas­sic­al Big Pi­card The­or­em to hy­per­bol­ic man­i­folds and gave me many art­icles deal­ing with re­lated prob­lems. Many times I rushed to his of­fice hav­ing “solved” the prob­lem and star­ted writ­ing my “solu­tion” on the black­board un­til I could no longer con­tin­ue, hav­ing come to a gap or an er­ror in my “proof.” Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi al­ways had time and pa­tience to listen to my wrong “proof” and nev­er sug­ges­ted that I should try to check my “solu­tions.” In­stead, he en­cour­aged me as I sat dis­cour­aged after dis­cov­er­ing my er­ror. Without his en­cour­age­ment I would not have been able to find a proof of a gen­er­al­iz­a­tion of the Big Pi­card The­or­em and ex­per­i­ence the deep pleas­ure of dis­cov­er­ing a math­em­at­ic­al the­or­em which has come to be known in hy­per­bol­ic geo­metry as Kwack’s The­or­em.

Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi un­der­stood not only the dif­fi­culty of do­ing math­em­at­ic­al re­search but also the chal­lenges faced by a young girl from a for­eign coun­try at the time when girls were not en­cour­aged to study. Pro­fess­or Wu at Berke­ley once said that Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi had the most fe­male thes­is stu­dents, mak­ing him the envy of the fac­ulty of the De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ics at Berke­ley.

Pro­fess­or and Mrs. Kobay­ashi came to vis­it Howard Uni­versity while I was there when Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi gave a week of lec­tures. He con­tin­ued to sup­port and en­cour­age me to do math­em­at­ic­al re­search by send­ing many art­icles, his as well as many re­lated ones, es­pe­cially whenev­er I men­tioned any in­terest in some prob­lems. Fur­ther­more, whenev­er I come to the Bay Area to vis­it my par­ents, he and his wife would take me to lunch and any gath­er­ings of math­em­aticians he was at­tend­ing.

I will be grate­ful to Pro­fess­or Kobay­ashi for the rest of my life for en­abling me to be­come a math­em­atician.