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| Best of Collectors |
Steve SMALE
by Wendell E. Wilson - Mineralogical Record - 4631 Paseo Tubutama -Tucson, Arizona 85715
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Steve SMALE Click On Picture To Go Back. |
Prominent mathematician, world traveler, political activist, boating enthusiast, accomplished mineral photographer and collector of aesthetic mineral specimens, Steve Smale is respected among amateurs and academicians alike.
You've probably seen him at mineral shows a tanned, casual Browser with somewhat long, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a comfortable sweater. Like many prominent people in the mineral world, his unassuming appearance gives no clue to his unusual expertise and accomphishments. Among his friends who have at least a remote understanding of his lofty status and endeavors as a mathematician he is held somewhat in awe. Others know him simply for his superb mineral collection and perhaps also for his skill as a mineral photographer
Stephen Smale was born on July 15, 193O, in Flint, Michigan. His family lived on a small ten-acre farm outside of town, and he attended a one-room school with but one teacher. She taught all nine grades (30 students), took care of the library, cooked the school lunches and did the janitorial work besides She had never finished college but, Steve says "she had a lot of energy." Although these circumstances were not conducive to a top-flight education, Steve's fellow students always did well in the country-wide test at the end of the eighth grade. And when Steve's turn came, he scored the highest of all 1000 students taking the examination.
Steve's father, Lawrence, had attended college but had not completed a degree program. He was a white-collar worker, employed in a ceramics laboratory of the AC Sparkplug company, and he allowed Steve to convert the loft of their large chicken coop into a chemical laboratory. Steve's primary interest in high school was chemistry- no hint as yet that he would devote his professional life to mathematics
His father taught him to play chess, and he eventually became a tournament player (coming in fiftieth out of about 130 entrants in the National Open). And his father also built him a telescope, nurturing an interest in amateur astronomy. However, no one ever accused Steve of being a child prodigy, and in fact one of his high school teachers was not especially encouraging about his idea of attending college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Nevertheless, he made the big jump to college, financed by a small inheritance from his grandfather and a four-year tuition scholarship. During his first three years he was a physics major and, although his grades were satisfactory, he switched in his senior year to mathematics
because it seemed easier. He played a lot of chess and Go, and became involved in political activism. Like his father, he was at that time a Marxist, and he joined the Communist Party, becoming heavily involved in left-wing politics and opposing the Korean War. "It was a question of avoiding the draft," he says, "which kept me studying at all." As a junior in college he had visited Eastern Europe, attending a Communist "Youth Festival" in Berlin around 1951, and back at home he organized a "Society for Peaceful Alternatives" on campus.
Because of these political activities (his grades were never in question) he was put on probation during his senior year. Although still somewhat casual in his attitude toward academic studies, he applied to attend graduate school at Ann Arbor and was accepted. During his first year, however, this attitude finally caught up with him, and he was warned by the chairman of the department that if his mathematics grades did not improve he would be jettisoned from the graduate program. Heeding the warning, Steve devoted himself seriously to mathematics and dropped out of the Communist Party. In later years he maintained some degree of activism, taking part in a controversial press conference at the International Congress in Moscow in 1966, and playing a central role in the early Vietnam protests (he was co-chairman, with Jerry Rubin, of the Vietnam Day Committee). But gradually his political views changed and broadened to the extent that today he considers himself anti-communist, and even right-wing on a few issues, although still decidedly left-leaning on others. Upset first by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and then by Communist activities in Southeast Asia and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he concluded that the pure Communist/Socialist system is essentially destructive, and this view was also reinforced by visits to the Soviet Union itself in 1961 and 1966.
During the fall of 1954, in his third graduate year, Steve met Clara Davis, who was then the student in charge of a Co-op. She was a very stable person, an anchor perfectly suited to Steve's temperament, and they were married two months later. They are still married today, and are the parents of two PhDs
In 1957 he was awarded a PhD in mathematics at Ann Arbor, and took the position of instructor at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1958 to 1960, became an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, and was a Visiting Professor at the College de France, Paris, in 1962. From 1961 to 1964 he was Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University, and from 1964 to the present day has been Professor of Mathematics at Berkeley. During his early professional years he ascended to the academic stratosphere of mathematics as a result of his work in the field of topology; he was awarded the Veblin Prize for Geometry by the American Mathematical Society in 1965, and the Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics in 1966, among other distinctions. His adVancements in topology are difficult to describe to non-mathematicians
but it should suffice to say that he became one of the world's leading lights on this esoteric subject
With his laurels still fresh and his professional niche secure, Steve nevertheless dropped the study of topology in 1961, much to the chagrin of his professional colleagues who felt abandoned and rejected by his sudden disinterest. But, in an interview with More Mathematical People (1990) (from which most of the information in this profile was drawn), Steve said:
I think that there was some truth in the statement that the main problems in topology I'd solved. Dimensions 3 and 4 were left open . . . [but] it was more interesting to me to go on to other things... The problems of the discrete dynamical system in the 2-sphere were ever so much more exciting and mysterious than anything left in topology.
So he changed boats in professional mid-stream and took up the study of dynamical systems, which involves the passage of physical states in time. A colleague in Brazil was especially encouraging, and Steve has since made many trips to Brazil for mathematical as well as mineralogical purposes. His interest in dynamical systems persisted into 1963, when he shifted his investigations to the calculus of variations and infinite dimensional manifolds, two subjects which he succeeded in unifying. In 1966 he was back to dynamical systems and remembers the time fondly as a period of much growth during which he had some of his best students
Since 1970 he has become involved in various subjects including the mathematical aspects of electrical circuitry, applications of global analysis, and especially mathematical economics. A 1976 paper in the Journal of Mathematical Economics even deals with a mathematical model applicable to specimen pricing at mineral shows! His involvement in economic theory has also led to a better understanding of the conflicts between capitalism and socialism. "Probably the solution," he says, "is to have some kind of balance between the two This is the position I've evolved to."
These days Steve is careful about where he spends his energies, and is working on a global perspective about science, and a world perspective about mathematics. Computer science he sees as a kind of revolutionary influence in mathematics because of its emphasis on algorithms and recursive function theory, which could ultimately make the foundations of mathematics more continuous rather than discrete. Looking at numerical analysis from a topological perspective, or the systematic study of algorithms, is the focus of his work in recent years.
Steve was also very much involved in the early development of a new field in mathematics called "chaos theory." His influence has been pervasive, as a reading of James Gleick's 1987 bestseller Chaos will show.
New interests have always been actively cultivated by Steve, who considers a "comfortable niche" to be more or less synonymous with a "rut." This is true in his private as well as his professional life. In 1987 he sailed a ketch (16 tons, 43 feet, with three private staterooms, living room and galley) from Berkeley to the Marquesas Islands in the South Seas. His crew consisted of two mathematician friends. The trip out from Berkeley was 25 days with no sight of land, but on the way back he anchored in Hilo, Hawaii to see Clara, make repairs and visit the Lyman House mineral museum.
And then there is his mineral collection, roughly 700 superb, aesthetic specimens. The original influence is traced once again to his father, who gave him a mineral in 1968. At about the same time several beautiful "coffee table" books on aesthetic specimens came out, further stimulating his interest. He came to the sudden realization that a private person could actually compete with museums for the finer specimens! Within a month or two he was "driving all over the state to every mineral shop, trying to buy minerals. I was pretty naive," he says, "but I put a huge amount of energy into it." Since then, he and Clara have put most of their disposable income into mineral specimens, and he has developed into a first-rate connoisseur. The love of beauty, and a sense of competitiveness are the driving factors. Freedom from damage, and an aesthetically crystallized, properly sized matrix are among their important criteria in selecting specimens.
If you can get some mineral that no museum or collector had, there's something . . . that makes it more beautiful. Beauty is very integrated with rarity [and] is connected so much with innovation and priority.
Traveling to foreign mineral-producing areas has proved to be one of their most successful ways of acquiring new specimens. Trips to Pakistan, Morocco, China, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil (seven times!) have yielded many superb crystal groups for their collection. Collecting minerals is one of the few outside endeavors Steve has actually taken time off from mathematics to do. Another is mineral photography-his skill was developed at the expense of an intense six-month hiatus in his professional work. Much of his inspiration during this developmental process came from great photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Harold and Erica Van Pelt. The results are on these pages, clearly showing that his time was productively spent. (He uses a Sinar 8 x 10-inch view camera.) Prints of his mineral photos, usually 16 x 20 inches, are available through Ziba Gallery, 64 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, California.
Over the years Steve has developed one of those enviable life-styles peculiar to very successful academics whose profession has bestowed upon them the maximum in elbow room. How does he do his mathematical work? "Naturally." Does he have a schedule? "No." He rises at 5 a.m. by choice, spends some time organizing his day, and perhaps puts some time in on his mineral photography. He is often colloquium chairman for his department at Berkeley, and teaches half time ( = one course). If he's grappling with a particular mathematical problem he may sit back and think about it for a half hour before dinner or after dinner. Then he'll spend a few minutes (!) preparing the next day's lecture. "And," he says, "our mineral collection takes a lot of time too-organizing it and doing things connected with it. "
With this kind of freedom, it is not unusual for him to attend the major mineral shows. If you are fortunate, you may even see an occasional exhibit of some of his specimens (he won the coveted McDole trophy at the Tucson Show in 1976). In the meantime, the selection of photos presented here will give some idea of the Smale Collection.
This article was first published in the Mineralogical Record, volume 23, September-October, 1992 and is reproduced here with the expressed permission of the author. |
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