by Rob Kirby
Cal Moore was born to Ruth Miller Moore and Robert Allen Moore on 2 November 1936 in New York City. His father, an MD specializing in pathology, was an eminent administrator who served as Dean of the School of Medicine of Washington University, St. Louis, from 1946 to 1954, and then was named Vice Chancellor of the Schools of Health at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1957, he became President of the Downstate Medical Center and was Dean of the College of Medicine of the State University of New York until his retirement in 1966.
Cal had a brother, Richard Allan Moore, 11 years his senior, who served in World War II and who was mathematically gifted: after the war, he earned a PhD in mathematics (1953) at Washington University in St. Louis, and following stints as a postdoc, took an appointment at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he went on to have a distinguished career.
Like his brother, Cal showed academic promise. Growing up in St. Louis, he was a good student and an athlete, enjoying both tennis and swimming. He received a BA in 1958 and a PhD in mathematics in 1960, both from Harvard. His PhD adviser was George Mackey, whom he later commemorated in a Memoir for the National Academy of Sciences.1
Upon receiving his PhD, Cal spent a year at the University of Chicago and then accepted an Assistant Professorship at UC Berkeley in 1961. He was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor in 1965, and almost immediately to Professor in 1966 — a testament to his excellent research record.
Cal’s administrative talents were also quickly recognized: first in his designation as Vice Chair of the Math Department under John Addison, and then in his appointment in 1971 to a five-year term as Dean of the Physical Sciences.
A first marriage in the 1960s ended in divorce and in the tragic death of his ex-wife, Eva, and their eight-year-old daughter, Joanne. Cal remarried in 1974 to Doris Fredrickson, who was at the time secretary to the Math Department Chair.
Many think that Cal’s crowning achievement was his prominent role in the establishment of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley — a visionary accomplishment in hindsight but not without controversy at the time. Briefly, the circumstances that led to its founding were these: as part of an effort to bolster the mathematical sciences, the National Science Foundation (NSF), with Al Thaler as a prime mover, solicited opinions from the academic community about how best to advance mathematics in the US. One idea that soon crystallized was to fund two new mathematical institutes along the lines of the Institute of Advanced Study, but with no permanent members. This scheme initially met with opposition, however, mostly over fear that the new institutes would cut into individual NSF grants which often provided funds for summer salaries. Everyone wanted new institutes, but not necessarily at their own expense.
Yet when the call for proposals went out in 1978, a team at Berkeley, led by Cal, S.-S. Chern and Is Singer, went promptly to work; in 1979 they submitted a proposal to create an entity that would administrate a new Institute independently of UC Berkeley though with the University’s cooperation. We all know of their ultimate success (MSRI’s creation was officially announced in June, 1981) and of the Institute’s nearly forty-five years of prominence in US mathematics.2 Less widely known is Cal’s pivotal, astute management of the nexus of interests that had to be reconciled to set the new Institute on solid footing with respect to its friend and close neighbor, UC Berkeley. Al Thaler writes:
Cal, more than anyone else, set MSRI on the path to be the truly exceptional Institution that it has become. I do not make that remark casually, for he was part of an extraordinary team. But without doubt it was he who was the principal in its formation, as well as with regard to his involvement in dealing with NSF and the University administration.3
In May of 1985, while still serving as Deputy Director of MSRI, Cal was asked to become Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Office of the President of the University of California (UCOP). He was reluctant to leave MSRI having done so much to get the Institute up and running, but the opportunity at UCOP was too tempting to pass up. Cal was subsequently chair of the Math Department from 1996 to 2002, serving two terms on account of his excellent leadership. During that time, he also wrote Mathematics at Berkeley: A History (AK Peters, 2007) about the Berkeley math department. My review of his book was published in the Notices in 2008 and is included in this volume).
I close with an anecdote to highlight what was surely key to his success as an administrator — his formidable powers of persuasion. In 1974, he convinced me to succeed him as President of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics. Four years later, I enlisted him to convince someone else to take my place, and this he also successfully did!
