Thursday, December 6, 2007

Happy 100th Birthday, Old Man!

Today is the 100th birthday of my late father, John Barkley Rosser, Sr., who died on September 5, 1989. One can learn from his Wikipedia entry that he was a famous logician who proved a generalization of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, invented "Rosser Sentences," helped prove the Church-Rosser Theorem in computability theory, to discover the Kleene-Rosser Paradox in same, as well as the Rosser Theorem in prime
number theory. He was also involved in the study of rocket ballistics, which led to him advising the US military during World War II, and continuing this later, eventually serving as Director of the US Army funded Mathematics Research Center (1963-73) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was bombed on August 24, 1970 by the anti-Vietnam War "New Year's Gang," resulting in the death of Robert Fassnacht, an anti-Vietnam War physics grad student.

I was a student there in those days, and while I have always disapproved of violence in protesting wars, I came to have strong political disagreements with my father, which ended up being reported in local newspapers ("the irony"), as well as eventually in books (_Rads_, Tom Bates, 1989, Harper Collins). However, later we reconciled personally, while continuing strong political disagreements. I always respected his intelligence and integrity, and this encourages me that it is possible to maintain civil discourse in this world across deep political divides, as long as mutual personal respect can be maintained.

13 comments:

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Correction: Rad was published in 1992.

Barkley (Jr.)

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Congratulations on this 100th year celebration of your father's life and talent, Barkley.

The time of the Vietnam war was a painful one for many Australian families too.

The then Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was on the phone repeatedly urging President Johnston to escalate involvment in that war. Just as Prime Minister John Howard (a true Menzies man) did the same with respect to the war in Iraq and with US President GW Bush.

Anonymous said...

Jr,
I'd agree generally that even significant political differences need not supersede civility and personal respect. I feel, however, that there is some greater difference in the ideological divisions that currently pervade our political system. There is something far more self aggrandizing in today's politics. It is not just about ideologies any longer. It has more to do with personal differences between ideologues, and the ideologies are secondary to the personal aspect. It's something more like, my ideas are better than yours, rather than, this idea is better than that. There is too much personal gain involved with todays political scene and the ancillary functions that surround the scene.

Putting it more concretely, can I really believe that someone like George Bush or Dick Cheney are truly patriotic Americans who believe in a conservative political doctrine. Or, are they just two self centered and avaricious demagogues who will brook no second thought.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Brenda,

Thanks. Again, while you sort of downplayed its virtues, from the perspective of us Yanks up here, the getting rid of Howard looks like a Good Thing.

Jack,

Well, of course, my condition here involved the maintaining of mutual personal respect. When people, especially people in power, repeatedly lie about what they are doing, especially things that really matter, like possible nuclear war (rather then their personal sexual peccadilloes), this is grounds for losing personal respect. I am afraid that this has come to pass for me with regard to the current leaders of the United States.

I also note that the stronger are the differences of opinion, the harder it may be to maintain personal respect. Certainly at the height of the Vietnam War feelings on both sides came to have strong moral overtones, which made it much harder also to maintain this sort of civility and respect. It became easier for my father and I to be civil after the war ended and he retired from his position (and especially after he then suffered from major health problems in 1974).

Barkley (Jr.)

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Barkley: "..while you sort of downplayed its virtues, from the perspective of us Yanks up here, the getting rid of Howard looks like a Good Thing.

I didn't mean to downplay the goodness-of-the-absence-of-John-Howard and his tight band of political tricksters, Barkley.

My previous post, full of exasperation, was a response to the limited choice available, my hangover migraine from the long hard-sell election campaign. Most of all a rolling despair because these people have sent us straight into peak-oil, climate-change, economic collapse. All at once and now!

The 'choice' presented to Australians was that of 'John Howard' or 'not-John Howard'. Two-party duopoly. Almost identical policies and behaviour... like choosing between a group of white-collar criminals versus "law violators". Same techniques of camouflage, rationalisations, semantic substitutions, hard sells, deceptive brand names, secret cartels, rigged bids.

Ungovernable corporate men.

How can we avoid another Vietnam?

Eleanor said...

Your father sounds remarkable. I will have to check his wikipedia entry.

kevin quinn said...

Hear, Hear! Happy Birthday, J. B. Rosser, Senior.

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Yes, happy birthday John Barkley Rosser Senior. I havent' met you but you somehow sound familiar to me.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Thanks, folks. I shall add another anecdote about my father.

His work on rocket ballistics also led him to be deeply involved in the formation and development of the US space program from a very early stage. With respect to this he performed one very important function at a certain point, making it possible for astronauts to make it to the moon and back without going off into deep space.

As the Mercury and Gemini programs proceeded on the way to the Apollo moon missions, it began to be noticed that as the astronauts were up longer circling the earth, they were landing farther and farther away from where they were supposed to. It was my father who figured out what the problem was. The clocks on earth were using solar time, relative to the sun, whereas the clocks in the space capsuled were using sidereal time, relative to the stars. These time systems vary by about one three hundred and sixty fifth due to the revolution of the earth around the sun. That meant that as a capsule was up longer, the disjuncture in time between the ground and space clocks increased, causing problems for navigation and targeting. My father figured this out and it was fixed prior to anyone being sent toward the moon. Thus they made it to the moon and back and not off hopelessly into deep space.

Barkley (Jr.)

Anonymous said...

interesting bio. i wonder if any one has tried the 'mutual respect' thing with suicide bombers. 'chi?'
(people like Bush may actually think conflict is a video game or a business school role play).

Richard zack has a note on a 'rosser year'.

the famous scientist richard lynn has suggested that due to dysgenics soon we will fulfill an ancient spiritual prophecy, by the '70's band 'we are devo', and as a result there will not be any more 'great men', or even interesting ones. the great chain of evolution will reverse.

so there won't be any new interesting wikipedia entries like this. or maybe its due to global warming. (i was surprised to see my first dinosaur today; seems they are coming back.)

(see also

arxiv.org/abs/0712.0993

for more evidence of hindu cosmology, and hogan of SciAm on 'the end of science'. )

sherrington-kirkpatrick results on spin glass computation of number of PSAT solutions also suggest, like 'peak oil', we may be past the time of 'peak theorems' and soon may have to rely on other sources of 'truth', possibly reports like the Brookings/CIA's national social/ism security report, fox news, and ouji boards (which permit consultants from the past earning income today).

(the micromathematics blog also has discussions on why math results tend to be few and far between pages of derivations, and most aren't important or interesting, in the big scheme of things; but he does not take a side on the Ehrlich/Julian Simon debate on whether per capita growth in theorems is limitless or unsustainable. Have any economists studied historical costs of theorems over time? Can there be substitues, such as 'manufactured consent' or 'might is right' as inputs to social processes?)

Its wild that the reimann zeta values were the first thing he computed---why didn't he just ring up Ramanujan?; the person i heard of first doing computing was Ulam, who tried to show 'ergodicity' and failed. so i guess there were parallel worlds.)

one name from that era one doesnt hear much about except by a problem, is E. Post, who wrote a pretty curious book.

last, its interesting that 'rosser's theorem' shows that the value of the nth prime is more than the 'entropy' of the nth number, p(n)>nlnn. that formula agin. its sort of suggestive.

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Barkley: "..making it possible for astronauts to make it to the moon and back without going off into deep space...

Wow! I didn't know that. How many steps beyond that chimplike forest creature that stood up and walked 5.8 million years ago :-))

He certainly sounds like an incredibly talented person.

[I remember watching the moon landing back in 1969. You know, Barkley, I had my (14 year-old girl) suspicions at the time that this was some form of advertising campaign for the American Government.

But I was a skeptic back in those days.]

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

media,

My father was a big fan of Ramanujan's and also of Emil Post's.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

brenda,

Regarding my father and the moon, I shall tell another story. He was always a big sci fi fan, and was of the old school that viewed it as at least partly a place for thinking about future actual science and technology and society, and was into it from the 1920s on. Anyway, after thinking about the whole thing carefully, he declared to some group of people publicly (do not know who exactly) that the US would put a man on the moon within 50 years, by 1979 that is. Apparently those who heard him at the time treated this forecast with much ridicule.

Anyway, of course it was only 40 years later that it happened. My father's big surprise, was that not only did it happen early, but that he was able to watch it live on TV! He did watch it, which was something unusual, as he almost never watched TV, viewing it as a waste of time in general.

Barkley (Jr.)