by Nancy Morawetz
Thank you all so much for the beautiful words about our mother and for helping us understand her work better. As you know, the past few months have been very difficult for our family — losing first our mother and then our father. Today is about her life and career, but to speak of her is also to speak about him. Our father was our mother’s greatest fan; he supported her throughout her career and helped her be the woman she was both professionally and in our family. We miss them and celebrate them.
Today, I would like to remember our mother and her very deep relationship with the Courant Institute. The Institute was incredibly important to her: providing a home for her professional career and a very special community.
Our mother describes her early choice to study mathematics as almost an accident. She loved history but found that mathematics provided a route to a generous scholarship. When she finished her undergraduate degree, she considered going to India to teach. Once persuaded to pursue graduate school in Mathematics, she had to find a place where she could study. Cal Tech, as many of you might know, summarily rejected her application because they did not take women. She instead pursued a masters at MIT. But it was not until she first visited NYU and the math community here, that she felt she had truly found her professional home. She was enraptured by the atmosphere — one where people discussed mathematics, and then talked about history, music, literature, theater and the issues of the day. She thought it was really wonderful and as you all know, she proceeded to do research, teach, befriend and collaborate with colleagues at NYU for the rest of her career.
For my mother’s four children, the Courant Institute was not just where our mother worked. It was a community that embraced us. We grew up knowing her colleagues, and their families. Our parents bought a house in New Rochelle where so much of the math faculty lived, and we played with her colleagues’ children. Later, when we lived in New York, we would frequent Courant events including teas and holiday parties.
A story that perhaps best encapsulates the importance of the Courant world to us dates back to when we moved to Manhattan. I was four years old and just starting to learn the pledge of allegiance. When I got to the part that should say “and to the republic for which it stands” I would say: “and to Uncle Richard for which it stands.” Richard Courant loomed that large for us!
At home, we were well-aware of how important our mother’s work was to her. We could tell when a theorem was going well…and when she found a mistake. If she was deeply involved in a theorem, we knew to expect the “mm mm” answer that meant she had not really heard our question. (A habit I am afraid I picked up.) But speaking at least for myself, I really didn’t know very much about what she did. I just knew that she loved her work and it was a very important part of her life.
That does not mean that math did not slip into our day-to-day lives. It took me many years to figure out that common expressions in our family were — well perhaps strange to our friends. Not every family talked in terms of “orders of magnitude” or said that something was true to the “\( n \)-th degree.” Nor do I think that in most families a child would be told that if she or he wanted extra meat and potatoes that it would be accompanied by an “epsilon” of spinach.
But mostly we knew our mother from our family time. We did a great deal together — traveling, skiing, and summering, where we spent our days swimming, sailing, reading and playing cards. Our mother was deeply involved with us and liked creating opportunities for large gatherings. She and my father, for example, would be the only adults on a ski trip each year with a dozen or so cousins and assorted friends. She welcomed these occasions, presiding over all the fun.
Our mother also relished unique, one-on-one relationships. She built these with her children, children in law, and many of her nieces and nephews — which included second and third cousins — no matter how distant they might seem in other families. She focused her attention on these very special friendships across generations.
Some of these friendships helped maintain our mother’s link to Ireland, a place that was always very dear to her. She told us that her father returned to Ireland because he missed walking the hills. But there was no question that she too would perk up about anything Irish, and that woe be to the one who did not realize that the name Cathleen began with a C.
Our mother had a deep love of sailing. It was a passion of hers that she first developed as a child sailing with her family on Lake Ontario and resumed when our parents rented a home on Long Island. Later, when we started summering on Lake Muskoka in Canada, she essentially ran a sailing school for her children, nieces and nephews, and later for some of her grandchildren. I had to pass her written test on parts of the boat, and much to my delight, had to show that I could flip the boat over and get it back upright. When her grandchildren came along, my mother started doing overnight sailing trips with them and my brother John. Always the teacher, she instructed one of my nephews on how to toss the anchor overboard — unfortunately she overlooked the part of the instruction in which the end of the rope is tied to the boat with a sturdy knot! As one of my more mathematically inclined nephews commented, topology and knot theory were not her favorite subjects.
But she was always the captain — not just on the sailboat but also at our summer home. My mother’s sister sent her a special Australian hat to wear to issue her “orders of the day” which turned into an elaborate ceremony each evening at the end of the meal. As another one of my nephew’s commented, his granny had a unique ability to get children to relish getting her hat and standing at attention as she issued orders on what chores they were expected to complete. A rather remarkable feat!
Grandchildren (and then great-grandchildren) were a special passion. Our mother loved make-believe games with young children, and would readily get down on the floor to play whatever character a three-year old assigned to her. She would sometimes develop elaborate plays with costumes, masks, and lines for the older children to learn. And when she decided to put on a Christmas pageant with her grandchildren, she recruited my father (at this point well into his eighties) to get down on all fours to play the donkey!
With her children and grandchildren, our mother was a great storyteller. She took stories from both hers and our father’s childhood and wove them into fascinating tales that we (and then the next generation) would ask her to repeat over and over again. It was only when I hit high school math classes that I appreciated the somewhat unusual names she gave to the main protagonists in all the stories — xzyz and pzqz.
And her greatest joy was to be around the youngest children. In her last months, the one photo she wanted to look at was of her eldest great-grandson, Xavier, sitting with his arms lovingly draped around the next great-grandson, Linus. And just two weeks before she died, when she was not feeling very well, she lit up when she received news from Linus that he was now a big brother to the latest addition, little Peter.
For me, and I know for so many others, my mother modeled a life in which a woman could have a highly successful career while being deeply involved in her family. I did not grow up seeing these objectives as at odds with each other, but instead as deeply complementary ways of living a fulfilling life.
Of course, it was not always easy, and our father’s support was key. With all four of us, our father got up for 2 a.m. bottle feedings. And when many of his colleagues left the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn for better endowed schools, our father stayed put, allowing our mother to remain at the Courant Institute.
Also key was the support our mother received from this Institute, where she had made lasting friendships, starting with her graduate school days with Louis Nirenberg, Peter Lax and Joe Keller, and where she continued to build friendships and professional relationships with colleagues over a period of seventy years. It was this Institute that allowed her to shine, and where Richard Courant helped her negotiate the tricky terrain of her professional and family life. For that we are deeply grateful.
So, on behalf of the family, thank you for this day and for your appreciation of our mother.
