In Memoriam: Richard Allen (Dick) Askey
By David Bressoud @dbressoud
Dick Askey died on October 9 of this year. I realize that he could be difficult. Not everyone has fond memories of him. But he was an incredibly important mentor to me. I want to take this opportunity to share a bit about the person that I have known and make clear the depth of the loss caused by his passing.
I first met Dick in the summer of 1976. I was a graduate student at Temple University. I had completed the bulk of the work for my PhD thesis, providing proofs and generalizations of some forgotten identities of Srinivasa Ramanujan that Brian Birch had recently discovered in the Oxford library. My advisor, Emil Grosswald, had suggested I talk about my results at the summer meeting in Toronto. I duly signed up for a 10-minute talk.
As I have since come to realize, 10-minute talks by unknown graduate students seldom draw large audiences. To make it worse, my talk happened to occur during the announcement by Appel and Haken of their proof of the four-color theorem. There were four people in my audience: the moderator, the person who spoke before me and who graciously stayed for my talk, the person who was nervously waiting to speak after me, and Dick Askey. Dick had taken the time and effort to go through the abstracts of the 10-minute talks and had decided that I might be doing worthwhile mathematics.
After my talk, we went outside where Dick explained to me the context in which he saw my work. He told me what I needed to read and the problems I should consider. And then he followed this up in a way that shaped my career.
George Andrews had spent the previous year with Dick in Madison working out results for basic hypergeometric series, the type of structure that I had been studying for my thesis. Dick informed George of my existence. Andrews and Grosswald had shared the same doctoral advisor, Hans Rademacher, and Grosswald had been on the faculty at Penn while Andrews was a graduate student. I don’t know whether it was Dick’s suggestion or George’s, but arrangements were made for George to visit Grosswald at Temple early in 1977, largely as an opportunity for George and I to meet.
We hit it off. During his talk, George posed a number of open problems. In the following weeks, I attacked them vigorously and managed to solve them. George was sufficiently impressed that he arranged for me to come to Penn State in a two-year visiting position. I would wind up spending seventeen years on the Penn State faculty.
During the 1980–81 academic year, I was a visitor at UW-Madison working with Dick. I returned for the fall term, 1982, as a Sloan Fellow. I have had the chance to visit Dick at home and once stayed at his house for a week. This has given me a glimpse into his personal life. Dick was an avid collector of mathematics books, but also of art. His collection has been eclectic, some of it extremely modern, but also pre-Columbian objects and Japanese netsukes. From the time I first visited him, he has been a strong supporter of the American Players Theater, which performs Shakespeare in Spring Green, Wisconsin. He has been extremely proud that central Wisconsin is home to such high-quality theater, and he has worked hard to ensure that they have been able to continue their efforts. His family has asked that gifts in his memory go to the American Players Theater.
One of the defining characteristics I have seen in Dick is his ability to recognize and his desire to support excellence in many different guises. It is an egoless striving. Dick’s contributions to mathematics have earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and—for him even more impressively—Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Yet the mathematical accomplishments of which he has been most proud involved his ability to get the right problems to the right people: the problem of the addition formula for Jacobi polynomials to Tom Koornwinder, the analysis of Pollaczek polynomials to Mourad Ismail, the algebraic-geometric setting of discrete orthogonal polynomials to Dennis Stanton, and the q-generalization of the Dyson-Gunson-Wilson identity to Doron Zeilberger. Dick showed me how to think about mathematics and how to recognize significant and important mathematics, whether ancient or modern. All of my books bear the imprint of what I learned from him.
Dick’s appreciation for excellence in art played a role in the story of the Ramanujan bust. When he read that Janaki Ammal, Ramanujan's widow, had been promised that a statue of Ramanujan would be erected—a promise that had never been fulfilled—he decided to right this wrong. Askey owned a small statue by Paul Granlund, an artist-in-residence at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. He approached the sculptor about commissioning a bust of Ramanujan, to which Granlund agreed even though the only image of Ramanujan that was known at the time was the famous passport photograph. Granlund required commitments for the purchase of at least three copies of the bust. He would produce up to ten. Chandrasekhar had been contacted about the appropriateness of a sculpture, and he lent his copy of Ramanujan's passport photo. He and his wife bought one copy, Dick and Liz Askey bought one, and money was raised for one to be given to Janaki Ammal. This could have been raised by three people making moderate gifts, but Askey thought Janaki Ammal would be more pleased if she received a large list of donors, so a 5 by 7 inch photograph was promised for a $25 dollar contribution. Eventually, there would be buyers for all ten castings.
Outside the circle of those who work in q-series, Dick is best known for his often controversial positions in mathematics education. Those positions need to be understood in the context of his great love for great mathematics. As Dick wrote to me a little over a year ago in response to a draft of a biographical article that I had shared,
The reason for my concern in the 1990s was it being harder to teach calculus, and then finding what NCTM had been doing. What interested me in Lee Shuman's address was not the separation of pedagogy and content, but ignoring content, which he called the forgotten part of education. He started with that, gave some illustrations, and then spent almost all the rest of the talk on pedagogical content knowledge. You could write that I have used some parts of Shulman's article, and then mention Ma's work, mentioning that she was a Ph.D. student of Shulman.
The references are to the NCTM Standards document which alarmed Dick—as well as many others—because of the omissions in the mathematics that it prescribed. Lee Shulmans’ article was the 1985 presidential address to AERA in which he bemoaned the lack of attention to mathematical content. Ma’s work is the now classic Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, which served as an impetus to the development of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching.
Dick was a man of incredible focus who was frustrated by any effort that did not strive for excellence. This was both a strength and a weakness. I once asked him if he played bridge. He responded that he had when an undergraduate, but then realized that if he was to play at the level he would expect of himself, it would consume far too much of his time. He had no tolerance for mathematical sloppiness and was quick to call it out. But I found that his fixation on what was taught often blinded him to consideration of how it was taught and the needs of disparate audiences.
Given what we have learned in recent years about effective methods of teaching, it is appropriate that today we are paying a lot of attention to how we teach mathematics. But we must never lose sight of the importance of the integrity of what we teach. Dick was a staunch and honest defender of good mathematics. The community of those who toil in mathematics education is poorer for his passing.
References
Askey, R. (2001). Good intentions are not enough. In The great curriculum debate: How should we teach reading and math?, T. Loveless, Ed., pages 163–183. Harrisonburg, VA: R.R. Donnelley and Sons. available at https://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf
Ma, L. (1999). Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. Lawrence Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Reprinted by Routledge, New York, 2010.
Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15:4–14.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). (1989) Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. Reston, VA: NCTM.
A list of all past Launchings columns, going back to 2005 with links to those columns can be downloaded from www.macalester.edu/~bressoud/launchings/launchings.docx