Robert
Sorgenfrey
Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus
Los Angeles
1915-1996
When Robert Sorgenfrey died on January
6, 1995, UCLA lost one of its most devoted sons. Bob entered UCLA
as a freshman in 1933 and received his undergraduate degree four
years later in Mathematics and Physics. In 1942, after graduate
studies at the Univ. of Texas followed by a one-year
instructorship at Case Institute of Technology, he returned to
Westwood as a temporary Instructor. He pursued his entire
academic career at UCLA, retiring as a full Professor in 1979.
Bob's record of contributions to UCLA,
both to the campus as a whole and to the Department of
Mathematics, is outstanding. Of the many positions he held, both
in the Academic Senate and the College of Letters and Sciences,
probably the most challenging was his service as Secretary of the
Academic Senate during the height of the loyalty-oath
controversy. Throughout his long career, university
administrators counted on Bob's energy, efficiency and good sense
in a great variety of roles, from Secretary of the Faculty of
Letters and Sciences to a term of service on the Budget
Committee, the predecessor the present Committee on Academic
Personnel.
Bob played a crucial role in the
development of the Department of Mathematics, from the postwar
years on. Not long after he joined the faculty, Bob became the
department's sole advisor for the department's majors, of which
there were already more than one hundred, as well as Scheduling
Officer with the responsibility for assigning faculty to the
department's courses. As the department grew, these tasks evolved
into a more official status, first as Assistant to the Chairman
and then as the department's first Vice-Chairman.
Bob's administrative talents and
intimate knowledge of the details of departmental operations made
him the right-hand man of successive department chairs.
As one of the department's most
outstanding teachers, it was no surprise when, in 1963, Bob was
the first mathematician to receive the UCLA Distinguished
Teaching Award. Immediately after the war, during which there had
been very little instruction at the graduate level, Bob and a
colleague instituted a highly successful and innovative graduate
course in topology. Bob had written his Ph. D. dissertation under
R. L. Moore, a topologist as famous for his unusual teaching
style as for his great success in training generations of the
world's best scholars in that field. The key feature of the
"Moore method" is to challenge the students to recreate
mathematical discoveries with a minimum of help from the
instructor. Bob taught his version of the method in this required
graduate course for many years with great success. Later, he
developed an undergraduate topology course which, in spite of its
reputation as one of the most difficult courses offered by the
department, was very popular with the mathematics majors, at
least when Bob taught it.
At the lower-division level, Bob had a
particular interest in the basic calculus course for students
majoring in engineering and the physical sciences. He would
generally teach the entire first-year sequence in order and
sometimes follow that with the second-year sequence the next
year. Students often arranged their entire course schedules
quarter by quarter in order to stay with Bob through as much of
the calculus sequence as possible. Bob's student following is
easy to understand when one reads their evaluations praising his
clear, concise lectures enlivened with humor and his deep concern
that all his students do their best. His examinations were often
characterized as "comprehensive" by the better students
and "long" by the less talented, but all emphasized the
fairness of his testing and grading.
Bob's interest in teaching extended well
beyond his UCLA courses. He played an active role in the Master
of Arts in Teaching degree program that prepared graduate
students for high school and community college teaching. During
the foreign travels that he and his wife Bernardine so much
enjoyed, where they pursued interests that ranged from fine
dining to bird-watching, he made contacts with people active in
the local secondary education programs. His concern with the
teaching of mathematics in high school eventually led him to a
very active career as author of successful texts at that level.
The range of his activities in mathematics education went all the
way from acting as consultant to his publisher on arithmetic
texts for elementary-grade students to supervising several Ph. D.
students in topology.
Bob's most notable research
accomplishment was his discovery of the "Sorgenfrey
Line". In a very brief paper that is considered one of the
classics of the topological literature, he solved a problem that
had defeated many of the best topologists. Although the real
numbers equipped with the half-open interval topology is a normal
space, Bob proved by an ingenious argument that its topological
product with itself is no longer normal. This example of the
failure of a fundamental topological property to be preserved by
a basic construction in the subject offers a deep insight into
the very nature of topology. Not only did the discovery of the
Sorgenfrey Line lead to considerable further research in the
foundations of topology, but it has become a permanent part of
every mathematics student's topological tool kit.
Aside from his professional career, Bob
and his wife enjoyed a very active social life and had many good
friends. The Sorgenfreys were avid bridge players and enjoyed
participating over the years in the UCLA Faculty Women's Club
duplicate bridge tournaments. He will be sorely missed by his
colleagues and friends both within and outside the Mathematics
Department.
Robert Brown
Andrew Comrey
Philip Curtis
John Garnett
Anyone who knew Brad Burns was surely
struck by his enthusiasm. This was his most enduring and
endearing quality and the one that he brought to bear on just
about all he did. Whether teaching or pursuing research,
administering programs or serving professional organizations,
training graduate assistants or debating political issues,
hunting for rare books or decorating his home with craftsman
furniture, attending the opera or entertaining guests, or
conversing with students, colleagues, and friends, his enthusiasm
seemed boundless. He was a person who cared about what he was
doing and about those with whom he interacted. His lectures and
speeches, always well prepared and well crafted, displayed a
passion too often lacking in academe today. He was effective in
drawing students into his field of Latin American history and
sought to rally others to his point of view. Perhaps because of
the Iowan populist traditions from which he sprang, he remained a
defender of the downtrodden of the world and did not shirk from
what he saw as his political responsibility to speak out. He was
indeed an engagé rather than an ivory-tower intellectual.
Clearly, his professional and personal lives reflected the wide
range of his interests and the balance of enthusiasms which they
spawned.
Brad was a prolific writer and a
magnetic speaker. His more than 10 books, articles, chapters,
prefaces, reviews, and opinion pieces as well as his hundreds of
oral presentations were aimed at a variety of academic and public
audiences. From his first book on Latin American history, The
Unwritten Alliance: Rio-Branco and Brazilian-American Relations
(1966), for which he received the Bolton Prize, to his last, Patriarch
and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858 (1991), he
tackled an unusual breadth of topics. While maintaining a general
focus on Latin America, his primary concentration shifted over
the years between Brazil and Central America, driven in part by
the historical questions he hoped to fathom and in part by the
dramatic impact of contemporary political events. He also
explored the uses of film and photographs as historical
documents. Repeatedly, however, he was attracted to such themes
as nationalism, dependency, folk and popular culture,
imperialism, and poverty. He also remained basically an
intellectual historian, who approached his subjects, whether
political, economic, or social, from that underlying point of
view.
Brad’s academic achievements were
widely recognized in the United States by means of Carnegie,
Rotary, NDEA, Cordell Hull, For, Rockefeller, Doherty, Fulbright,
Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation fellowships. He
received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, a Hubert Herring
Memorial Award from the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American
Studies, an Award for Distinguished Scholarly Reporting in a
Non-Academic Periodical from the Latin American Studies
Association, and was named an Honorary Associate of Immaculate
Heart College Center and a Distinguished Visitor by Oberlin
College.
Abroad, the Brazilian government
conferred upon him the Order of Rio Branco in 1966, and he was
elected one of only two corresponding members of the Institute
Histórico e Geogrŕfico Brasileiro in 1969. At times his
polemical writings brought him further national recognition-even
notoriety. Even before the publication of his book, At War
with Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia
(1987), a brief article on the Sandinistas led to a public
condemnation from President Reagan and even an appearance on
"Nightline," thus giving him, as Brad himself put it,
his very own "fifteen minutes of fame," in the
well-known phrase of Andy Warhol.
His institutional contributions were
also prodigious. Brad enjoyed working hard and felt a strong
commitment to program building at UCLA and more broadly in the
fields of history and Latin American studies. After completing
his education (B.A., University of Iowa, 1954; M.A., Tulane
University, 1955; Ph.D., Columbia University, 1964) and following
two years of teaching at Rutgers University and the SUNY at
Buffalo, he came to the UCLA History Department as an assistant
professor in 1964. Other than a brief interlude at Columbia
(1967-1969), he spent the remainder of his career at UCLA,
retiring as a full professor in 1993. From the outset he was
known as a gifted lecturer, and his courses grew steadily in
popularity among undergraduate students, many of whom he inspired
to major in history. His lower division surveys typically drew
300400 students and his specialized course on Brazil about 200.
At the graduate level, at least five students each year benefited
from their apprenticeships as his teaching assistants, and by the
summer of 1995 dozens had completed Ph.D. dissertations under his
direction. His university committee service ranged from Chicano
studies to the Film and Television Archive, but his participation
in Latin American Center programs was continuous and productive.
From 1979 to 1983, he served as the first dean of the Honors
Division in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. Off campus
his tireless efforts to promote teaching and research in Latin
American Studies and history were highlighted by his presidencies
of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies in
1973-1974 and of the Pacific Coast branch of the American
Historical Association in 1993-1994.
Brad remained involved with people and
projects until the very end. His book Kinship with the Land:
Regionalist Thought in Iowa, in 1894-1942, a history of his
home state, was accepted for publication by the University of
Iowa Press only in his final months and was issued in winter 196.
He also guided his last five graduate students through the
completion of their dissertations in the spring and summer of
1995. In the fall, though very ill with terminal liver cancer, he
was able to make one final trip - a Mississippi River steamboat
excursion, accompanied solely by his 85-year-old mother, Wanda A.
Schwandke Burns. As he had wished, Brad died peacefully at
home—on December 19, 1995. He is survived by his mother, his
sister Karen Burns Kenny, and his longtime friend and companion,
David Aguayo.
Always exuberant but seldom sentimental,
Brad was a constant friend and colleague. He enriched the lives
of those around him, yet he remained a private person. He was
tolerant of the conflicting opinions of others though rarely
swayed by them. He was a romantic, even to the point of being
quixotic, but at the same time he remained coolheaded with a firm
sense of immediate reality. A dreamer, he was very much his own
man, cerebral and reserved, who undoubtedly nurtured other
enthusiasms that were his alone. We shall miss him.
Ludwig Lauerhass, Jr.