Foreword
Professor Solomon Marcus’s Adventures
at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA
(2008 and 2011)
I invited Professor Solomon Marcus, my former PhD adviser, to visit Brown University, the Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Department of Computer Science so that we could work together on research problems in 2007.
He wound up traveling to Rhode Island twice – for a month in August 2008 and again for a month in July 2011. His visits were funded by CCMB (which, at the time, I directed), the Department of Computer Science, and Sorin Istrail Laboratory.
It had been many years since we had last seen one another, but on the August day I picked him up at the airport in 2008, he looked as though he had not aged. He was still a dynamo, ever a storyteller – full of life and eager to share his intellectual bounty with me: scores of new ideas, new mathematical theories and theorems. That evening, my wife and I took Marcus to one of Providence’s great restaurants.
I had reserved accommodations for him at the university’s Guest House. It was an older building like many on campus, now 260 years old. He shared the space with several other visiting professors. This posed a few challenges, for just six months earlier, Marcus had undergone major stomach surgery necessitating specific dietary adaptations. (I learned from his Guest House experiences: For his second visit in 2011, I reserved private accommodations for him at the more modern Renaissance Hotel in Providence, where he had a refrigerator in his room and a hotel restaurant capable of providing the kinds of food he required.)
The day after his arrival, I picked Marcus up at the Guest House and escorted him to the Center for Information Technology building (CIT), home of the university’s Computer Science Department and the CCMB. My office became his, as did my assistant, Erin Klopfenstein.
Erin was exceptional in everything she did as my personal assistant in the department. She was detail-oriented and highly competent in all the technical aspects of the job. Her positive outlook, energetic presence and respect for everyone made her an invaluable member of the team.
Marcus soon became an admirer. They started working together on several projects – a list that grew daily (a Marcus trademark). She also helped him locate and print online literature that he was unable to find among Brown library resources. When it was time for Marcus to depart for Romania, Erin told me that tears streamed down his face as he bid her farewell. (Erin has since gone on to become Administrative Director of a medical institute at Harvard University.)
Marcus was very excited to be in our Department of Computer Science and at Brown, an Ivy League institution offering a richness of resources. Between Brown’s renowned libraries and, with Erin’s assistance, nearly all the world’s scientific literature at hand, he had within reach the many papers he had wanted to read for so long. You could see the thrill on his face. Pure intellectual happiness! He immediately began posing mathematical problems to my students and me.
We began each day together with a walk during which we discussed the subjects that would become our research projects – John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Edsger Dijkstra, and others. It was delightful to see him in such high spirits, ready to work. And such a sense of urgency! He immediately wanted to focus on our work, indicating that we could not waste time, for our time together was a most precious thing. Even during my last phone call with Marcus, when he was a patient at Bucharest Hospital, he spoke with the same passion about continuing our work. He was especially concerned about our project related to the John Conway Days at the Moisil Institute in Iasi. For it, Marcus had prepared a set of literally 100+ questions to ask Conway. Indeed, for those in attendance, the Q&A between them was a once-in-a-lifetime event, an academic exchange from critical to sublime and a showcase of mutual admiration. Unfortunately, it was not recorded and, as of today, no documentation is available.
One morning in his first week at Brown, I met Marcus to take him to breakfast. As the sun shone on his face full of contagious wisdom, he exclaimed “I am at age zero! (Sunt la vârsta de zero ani!)” Marcusism!
[…]
The Solomon Marcus Lectures at Brown University,
Providence, RI, USA
These 12 lectures are a symphony of Marcusian thought, a Marcus Tractatus.
A universal mathematician like Marcus presents without formulas in order to alleviate the mathematician’s loneliness by opening her/his mystery to the public. These themes become the fabric and foundation – the building blocks, so to speak – of our intellectual thought. Through them, Marcus provokes us, entices us to think critically about the universal themes of his life-long reflection. Aspects of my own work relate to the 12 lectures Marcus presented. I elaborate below.
The themes of his lectures:
- A mathematician’s longings and universality go hand in hand
- Mathematical proof is about fictional objects not reality
- Contrasting classical science, such as statistical mechanics, with modern science after the Information Revolution and emergence of computer science
- Understanding of a binary distinction is perhaps the simplest act of intelligence we can imagine – but conflicts are hidden in the binary
- Quantitative information (thermodynamics) vs. qualitative information (Darwinian biology)
- Successful science progresses though mistakes
- In the language of biology and heredity, is the cell a semiotic system?
- Finite words languages vs. infinite words languages seem incapable of “interacting” with each other in a joint theory
- Euclidean/non-Euclidean not only define geometry; they are concerns on the totality of aspects of culture
- Correctness and meaning: cooperation vs. conflict of logical, grammatical, juridical, moral or political
- Why is the nature of the cognitive function of mathematics so controversial?
- Symmetry in mathematics, natural science and the visual arts provides a road to successes but also to “happy mistakes”
[…]
Acknowledgements
A magnificent team effort is the reason this book of Professor Solomon Marcus’s Lectures at Brown University exists.
Preserving the videos of the lectures – the first eight presented in 2008 and the next four in 2011 – was a big challenge. The lectures’ video software was stored on my Brown University webpage and the webpage of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB), where I served as director during both of Marcus’s visits to Brown. At that time, my former PhD student Derek Aguiar was the CCMB’s volunteer software engineer. I asked him to please save the CCMB webpage in our files to ensure preservation of the center’s activity. Derek is a software engineer of a rare calibre: I compare his skills with those of the absolute best engineers I worked with at Celera Genomics and Sandia National Laboratories. Because of him, we have these lectures available 17 years later. Center directors changed, software frameworks for web pages that are part of the Brown site changed abruptly without notice (intentionally or not), but we were safe: Derek saved the CCMB webpage in his files. We are lucky to have this historical record available today. (You can see them on my Istrail Lab webpage at https://istrail-lab.github.io/lectures/solomon-marcus/) Thank you, Derek, for being a force for good, for being a guardian and preserving Istrail Lab’s software content treasuries.
Once we recovered the lecture videos, my student Colin Baker used AI software to extract from them the texts of Marcus’s lectures. The extraction software is somewhat great, but the text was far from perfect. Thank you, Colin, for your excellent work.
Tracie Sweeney has been my collaborator and editor throughout my 20 years at Brown. I met her when I joined Brown. She worked in the University’s media relations office and interviewed me for a series of profiles about new professors. Her work for the Marcus volume provided the needed editorial skills to transform the video transcripts into a professionally edited, wonderful lecture text. Her contribution to the volume is without question one of the most essential parts of this work. Thank you, Tracie, for being an outstanding and amazing editor and collaborator on this project.
Ionel Urdea Marcus provided the next most valuable contribution in English editing and figure design and drawing, reformatting the text for clearest clarity, and most especially writing the footnotes for the many citations that Professor Marcus presented in his inspiring lectures. These footnotes describe the personalities whose work is cited in concise but wonderfully substantive way. Thank you, Ionel, for your very valuable contributions to the volume.
Alina Ledeanu, the Editor-in-Chief of the Secolul 21, the premier intellectual magazine of Romania, where the volume will be published as a twelve-issues volume, has been, from the start of this book project in 2023, the strongest supporter possible. Over the last two years she made essential contributions in the design of the project, providing large resources from the magazine editorial team. She has been an inspiration for me as a writer and editor of the volume. Thank you, Alina, for your extraordinary leadership and inspiration.
Financial and overall resources for Solomon Marcus’s two months stay at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, including the video recording, were provided by the Center for Computational Molecular Biology and the Department of Computer Science at Brown. Additional financial support and resources were provided by the Sorin Istrail Laboratory.
SORIN ISTRAIL holds an Endowed Chair Professorship at Brown University. He is the James A. & Julie N. Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University.” (Endowed Chair Professorship is considered one of the highest honors a faculty member can receive from an institution. Sorin’s Endowed Chair is “In Perpetuity”, this means the position’s continuous existence and funding for generations to come, regardless of fluctuations in the economy.)