Astronomy and Family: The 1945 Eclipse

This post comes as many prepare to head off to hopefully witness a total eclipse tomorrow, April 8, 2024.

There are a couple Princeton connections to the total eclipse that took place on July 9, 1945--one being a "Princeton Party", presumably from Princeton, that journeyed to Montana for the event. The other has to do with a renowned astronomer named Chandrasekhar, whom Princeton sought to add to its faculty the following year. But I primarily want to tell of a familial connection I have to that eclipse nearly 80 years ago.

From a biography of my father, astronomer Al Hiltner: "In 1945 Hiltner and Chandrasekhar went to Canada to photograph a total eclipse of the sun. This represented a unique collaboration with the theorist Chandrasekhar, for I believe that the paper showing those photographs remains the only observational research paper ever published by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar." My father had just joined Chandra, a future Nobel Prize winner, on the faculty at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory.

I found these photos, probably taken by my father, online. That may well be the family tent in the background, more often used for canoe trips, with Chandra standing in the foreground, maintaining the formality of a suit in the outback of Manitoba, Canada. 

They had chosen to set up on "a slight ridge commanding a clear view of the eastern sky some five miles southeast of Pine River."

It looks like they even installed a fence around their site, perhaps to discourage cattle or other animals from disturbing their equipment.

The combination of all their preparations and some good luck made for a successful mission:

"On July 9th morning the eastern sky was cloudy, but the drifting clouds produced a clear region some twenty-five minutes before totality. The entire sky clouded over again half an hour later."

By July 1945, Germany had surrendered and Japan would soon thereafter. According to wikipedia, Chandra worked in the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds during WW II. He would surely have collaborated with Veblen, who oversaw scientific work at Aberdeen. That Princeton offered Chandra a position one year later, after Veblen's close friend, Henry Norris Russell, retired, may not be coincidental. Princeton's interest resulted in the doubling of Chandra's salary, as U. of Chicago increased his pay to match Princeton's offer. 

Historical Research Can Uncover Uncanny Coincidence

There are some aspects of my role in adopting Veblen House as a longterm project that border on the uncanny. Coincidence has accumulated as I've researched the people who lived in the house. The Veblen House itself, I realized at some point, has much in common with the house I grew up in. 

That house, next to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, is now also named after a renowned scientist, the astronomer Otto Struve, and is similar in color to what the Veblen House was, and is at the end of a drive, surrounded by woods, 

Also echoing the Veblen House, it's even approached along a slightly curving walkway, down and to the left as one pulls into the driveway. 

Oswald Veblen came to Princeton after growing up in the midwest, as did I, and after having lived in a progression of university towns, as did I. His grandparents emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin, where I spent my childhood. His father's father built houses and barns, as did mine. His father was a physicist, mine an astrophysicist. Veblen got his PhD at the University of Chicago, where my father would later spend most of his career. It's likely that Veblen as a boy of 13 saw the 40 inch refracting telescope my father used--the world's largest refracting telescope--on exhibit at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. I almost went to Carlton College, where Veblen's father and all of his aunts and uncles got degrees. I spent my childhood roaming the expansive grounds of Yerkes Observatory, where brilliant scientists lived on the outskirts of a small town with school colors orange and black, not unlike the circumstances of the Institute for Advanced Study, which Veblen helped to found on the outskirts of Princeton. 

As if these coincidences aren't enough, there's also the first owners of what would later be called the Veblen House, Jesse and Mary Whiton-Stuart, who lived their last years in towns I have familial connections to--San Luis-Obispo, CA and Tucson, AZ, the latter being where we'd go as part of my father's work at nearby Kitt Peak Observatory.

And then there's the uncanny coincidence that came to light when I began researching the origins of the house in Ann Arbor where I lived for many years. It was built and lived in by Walter Colby, a nuclear physicist who in many ways played the same role at U. of Michigan that Veblen played in Princeton, bringing brilliant scholars from Europe to raise the level of science and math in the U.S. They had parallel lives, born in the same year, retiring the same year, their legacies largely forgotten and in need of rediscovery. Neither had children, and both played important military roles in World Wars I and II. Both were married to women who also led singular lives, and tended to beautiful gardens. 

Vera Rubin--The Courage of Her Curiosity

A friend sent an article from the Atlantic Magazine announcing that a telescope is being renamed in honor of the great astronomer Vera Rubin. That article in turn has led to autobiographies by Ruben and another great astronomer, Margaret Burbidge, both of whose careers intersected with my father's.

Largely government funded, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the first national U.S. telescope to be named after a woman. Though the story has no direct connection to Oswald Veblen, it is congruent with his heritage and legacy. In the late 1800s, when women had far fewer options for pursuing higher education, Veblen's parents and grandparents sent all their children to college, daughters and sons alike. One generation attended Carlton College, the next the University of Iowa, which has the distinction of being the first public co-educational university in the U.S..

Oswald would take that familial heritage into his career in Princeton, where he used his position of influence to help the great mathematician Emmy Noether, displaced after the Nazi takeover in Germany find employment in the U.S.. Veblen took the lead in helping find her a position at Bryn Mawr and inviting her to be a Visitor at the IAS. By that time, 1933, Veblen had left Princeton University to become the first faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was non-discriminatory from its inception. Princeton University, on the other hand, was men-only until 1975. When Vera Rubin expressed an interest in attending Princeton for graduate studies in 1948, the university would not even send her an application. Princeton ultimately came around, giving her an honorary degree in 2005.

Vera Rubin, who was a lifelong advocate for women in science, was herself inspired by a woman astronomer born 110 years earlier than herself, Maria Mitchell. Demonstrating the power of history and legacy, Rubin reportedly chose to attend Vassar College because Mitchell had been a professor of astronomy there 80 years prior.

The story of Vera Rubin has its most direct connection here to my own family's history. The first connection I discovered is geographical. Cerro Pachon, the mountain in northern Chile where the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is nearing completion, is only a half hour from Cerro Tololo, where I spent some free-range halcyon days as a boy, exploring the desert and tossing rocks off the edge of the mountain while my father, W. A. Hiltner, was on extended observing runs.

Another connection is also through my father's career, which intersected to some extent with Vera Rubin's, as in this 1971 photo with my father on the left and Vera Rubin's on the right (courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Dorothy Crawford Collection), and to a much greater extent with the work of astronomer Margaret Burbidge. A NY Times obituary from 2016 states that "Dr. Rubin, along with Margaret Burbidge ..., was a “guiding light” for a generation of female astronomers."

If it's possible to encapsulate major contributions, "Rubin’s work in the 1970s provided convincing evidence that dark matter existed," while Margaret Burbidge and her husband and fellow astronomer Geoff Burbidge, "were best known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from carbon and iron to lead and uranium."

The Burbidges, originally from England, along with two other great scientists, Fred Hoyle and William Fowler, stirred things up in the astronomy world with their progressive thinking. Their names were very familiar in our household, growing up.

In reading the interviews and autobiographies of Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge, I was gratified to discover the role my father played in Margaret's career early on. This was at a time when many institutions of higher education considered astronomy a men-only profession. Margaret's application in 1945 for a Carnegie Fellowship in Pasadena was rejected due to her being a woman, and in 1948 Vera Rubin, as mentioned, was not even allowed to apply for graduate studies at Princeton University. The largest telescope, at Mt. Palomar, would be unavailable for women until Rubin broke through that barrier in the mid-60s, famously taping the figure of a skirt on the bathroom door to create a women's bathroom.

There were no such restrictions at the University of Chicago's department of astronomy, and its two renowned observatories in Wisconsin and Texas. My father was on the faculty at U. of Chicago, based at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. In 1951, he was able to arrange funding for Margaret to take a position there, and later came up with a way for her to get coveted observing time on the 82" telescope at McDonald's Observatory in Texas. From her autobiographical essay:

Before the cold Yerkes winter set in, Geoff and I prepared a program to submit for McDonald observing time ... But the time for submission was past; since we wanted winter time when the December Milky Way was up, we were too late. Here the never-to-be-forgotten kindness of Al Hiltner came to our rescue. He had set me to work on prevention of internal reflections and scattered light in a spectrometer for calibrating coude plates at McDonald, and he had a month (I believe) scheduled for photometry at McDonald. He said there would be many nonphotometric nights during this period, and if Geoff and I could get ourselves to McDonald ... we could have the non-photometric nights for spectroscopy ...

Gratifying, too, was reading Burbidge's and Rubin's descriptions of their burgeoning curiosity as children. It brought back memories of growing up among astronomers who loved their work, in a family where curiosity and creativity were valued. Science for me has always been about beauty and exploring the magnificence of creation. 

 Vera Rubin describes her curiosity about the world and her active imagination:

As a youngster, more questions followed. Why did the pictures on my bedroom wall jump back and forth on each side of my finger as I lay in bed blinking my eyes? How did water drops in a stream know on which side of a rock to pass? Could I, a lazy child, devise a street on which one sidewalk went uphill and one side downhill, so that I could always walk downhill? A little later, the questions were more conventional. How many license plates can be made with three numbers and two letters? This puzzle I solved as we drove to our new home in Washington, D.C.

Margaret Burbidge describes it this way:

At age 4, before beginning school, my first view of the beauty of stars in the summer sky during a night-time boat crossing from England to France was the earliest step toward a lifetime love of astronomy. Then I developed an early interest in arithmetic and in numbers (especially large ones with many powers of ten to write out and contemplate); this began in my first years in school. I had learnt to read before going to school, so books were a continuing delight. My parents gave me books written for children on all the natural sciences, and reading these was coupled with both my mother's and father's willingness to show me and tell me about the wonders of the seashore, of flowers, plants, and trees (both my sister and I became passionate tree climbers throughout Hampstead Heath, near which we lived). My love of flowers is lifelong, and has been inherited by my own daughter.

And later in her youth:

When I was 12 or 13 years old, my grandfather gave me Sir James Jeans' popular books on astronomy. Suddenly, I saw my fascination with the stars, born at age 4, linked to my other delight, large numbers. That the nearest star is 26,000,000,000,000 miles away revived those excitements of my first school years (although falling short of my then favorite contemplation, 1 followed by 36 zeros). I decided then and there that the occupation I most wanted to engage in "when I was grown up" was to determine the distances of the stars. My mother recalled telling me, as I lay on my stomach on the floor reading the wonders described by Jeans, that it was bedtime, and that I pleaded for a little more time: "Mum, it's so exciting!" 

Combined with the intellectual and emotional delight--and resonating with Veblen's hiking and woodchopping ways--was the pleasure Margaret found in the physicality of exploration, whether climbing trees as a kid or spending nights in the dome of an observatory with the heavens above. My father came to astronomy after growing up on a farm, and brought that appetite for physical work and resilience against the elements with him, donning insulated underwear for long nights in the Wisconsin winter, where the best nights for observing were also the coldest.

Margaret put it this way:

I often think about the joys of work in an open dome, under the stars, next to the telescope, joys denied to most younger astronomers and students who must sit in a warm console room, facing a television guiding screen and many complex computer interfaces, well removed from the telescope itself. 

Smuggling that avid curiosity and sense of wonder into adulthood not only enriched their lives. It likely helped Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge break through (or find ways around) the barriers they encountered as women in a profession dominated by men. One sentence in Vera Rubin's autobiography stood out. In 1960, Rubin had just arrived in the Netherlands for an International Summer Course in Science. There she heard lectures from some of the world's greatest astronomers--Jan Oort and the Burbidges among them. "Initially," she wrote, "Oort terrified me, but I soon had too many questions to stay silent."

Thus the title of this post: The Courage of Her Curiosity. In the 21st century, when so many people hold convictions, sure they are right when surely they are wrong, we would do well to turn to curiosity as a better source of courage.

(Vera Rubin posing with Kitt Peak Observatory in the background--an institution my father played an important role in developing, and where a telescope bears his name. It was at Kitt Peak in 1968 that Vera Rubin and Kent Ford made discoveries that would transform our understanding of the universe. Thanks to AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives for these photos.)

Astronomer John Irwin: A Familial and Veblen Connection

One of my favorite astronomers from my youth turns out to have had a connection to Oswald Veblen. John Irwin was a colleague of my father's who loved kids and hiking as much as he loved astronomy. He'd stop by Yerkes Observatory for American Astronomical Society meetings, and my older sister remembers him getting down on his hands and knees in the living room of the director's house and giving her a horse ride. As a kid growing up around astronomers, you remember those few that would come down to your level, and John was one of those who would literally do that.

I remember him from family visits to Chile in the mid-1960s, where he was living with his wife on top of the next mountain over from Tololo, where my father would have observing runs. (Note: In reading recently a bio of the well-known popularizer of astronomy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, I noticed that he did his graduate observing at Tololo.) John was doing the site surveying work that lays the groundwork, so to speak, for siting new observatories in the northern Chilean desert--one of the best places in the world to do astronomy. One of the mountains he explored, Las Campanas, would two decades later be the site for the Magellan telescopes--my father's last design project.

One thing observatories in the desert need is a water supply, and one day John took my brother Bill and me on a hike down the mountain to check the flow in the creek from which Tololo drew its water. We were hiking down a steep slope when I lost my footing and did what must have looked like a wild improvisatory dance as I slid down the mountainside, trying to break my momentum. When I finally came to a stop, unscathed, he congratulated me on my footwork. That sort of compliment means a lot to a kid, and it's always stayed with me.

He told us about a mountain that had many false summits, that is, the climber would look up and think the summit close at hand, only to soon discover that the mountain continues up and there is much hiking still to do. A climber, tight against the mountainside with limited view of what's above, can be fooled multiple times before finally reaching the top. That story has come to resonate with life and work in general. John loved mountains so much that he celebrated his 85th birthday by climbing his favorite mountain, Mount Whitney, in the Sierra Nevadas of California. His father's family was from Philadelphia, and claimed Ben Franklin as an ancestor.

Along with his Veblenesque combining of intellect and a love of the outdoors, John has a familial connection to Princeton and its math department. He was born in Princeton in 1909, while his mathematician father, Frank Irwin, was serving an instructorship from 1908-11, alongside Veblen, who had arrived three years earlier. Both were hired by Henry Fine, for whom the PU mathematics building is named.

As a young man, John lived for awhile in Iowa City, Veblen's home town, and was one of the first astronomers to write, back in 1948, about the potential of the early computers that Veblen had done so much to bring into being.

During one of those visits to the mountains of Chile in the mid-1960s, my family drove one evening over to the mountain where John and his wife had their house. After dinner we played Hearts. I'm guessing it was his favorite card game, and quickly became ours. "I smell smoke," John would say ominously, when he surmised that someone was trying to flush the queen of spades. Other things John liked to say were "Much grass, poor flavor"--his comic play on the Spanish "muchas gracias, por favor"--and "We're off in a pile of monkey vomit," spoken with mock grandness at the beginning of a journey, lest we take human enterprise too seriously.

At some point that evening, I went outside and walked to the edge of the mountain, maneuvering around boulders and the droppings of goats. At the edge, lit by a deep universe of stars and moon, was a frozen ocean, extending out as far as I could see. It was the top of the massive cloud of fog that would move inland each night from the Pacific coast, bringing moisture to the desert. I wish everyone could have such vistas growing up, where the landscape draws your eye to look farther and farther into the distance, with the quality of the air the only limit. Maybe, with vistas like that to open up our minds and expand our thinking, we might take better care of that thin skin of air that comprises the earth's atmosphere, and take more of an interest in what lies ahead.

John Henry Barrows Irwin completed his itinerant astronomical career at Kean University, halfway between where his father grew up in Englewood, NJ, and his birthplace in Princeton. For retirement, he moved with his wife to Tucson, where he spent his last 20 years, climbing mountains.

Photo: 

Date: January 12, 1966
Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, John Irwin Slide Collection
Catalog ID: Irwin John B4

The Kuiper Belt and Veblen House--a Chance Connection

Here's a mix of recent news and personal past with a chance Veblen House connection. Kuiper, a name familiar to me from childhood, was in the news as 2019 began. In the wee hours of January 1st, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by "Ultima Thule," an object 4 billion miles from Earth in what is called the Kuiper Belt, home to Pluto and other frozen objects in what has been described as "a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system."

The term "Kuiper Belt" was new to me, but astronomer Gerard Kuiper for whom it is named was a colleague of my father's at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory. Kuiper's best known student was Carl Sagan, an astronomer who later did much to popularize science through his Cosmos television series and many books. From my recent correspondence with one of Sagan's friends and fellow student, Peter Pesch, it looks like Sagan was pursuing an unusual route in astronomy even back then: "Kuiper was exclusively interested in the solar system, which few of us were, except, of course, Carl Sagan."

In the photo, my father Al Hiltner and Gerard Kuiper are 2nd and 4th from the left, respectively, with Nobel prize winner Chandra first on the left.

Kuiper's name also popped up in a much more obscure location when I was researching the life of the Whiton-Stuarts, first owners of what became known as the Veblen House. The wife, Mary (Marshall Ogden) Whiton-Stuart, spent her last years in Tucson, AZ. Kuiper moved there in 1960 to found the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Here's a snippet from a previous post on this website:

Astronomy and the Whiton-Stuarts came together in the Nov. 16, 1964 issue of the Tucson Daily Citizen, which included Mary's obituary and, elsewhere on the same page, an announcement:

"To Speak At Dinner--Meet Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will speak Sunday at the annual Compact Day dinner meeting of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Arizona." 

Mary was an eighth generation descendant not of Mayflower pilgrims, but of a pilgrim who settled in what would become New Jersey, John Ogden.

Update: In another unexpected link between Yerkes Observatory and Veblen House, I recently contacted a U. of Chicago alum who had written a strongly worded letter to the alumni magazine lamenting the university's having moved out of the observatory. The author, Daniel Campion, happens to live in Iowa City, where Oswald Veblen grew up. Daniel took a break from his writing to research Veblen's childhood home, which will be the subject of another post. He also sent me a "squib" he had published--a short poem about Ultima Thule called "Marriage Made in Heaven."

Veblen's Interactions with Astronomer and Visionary George E. Hale

Oswald Veblen loved buildings. He largely designed the first home for the Princeton University math department--the original Fine Hall--and as the Institute for Advanced Study came into being soon thereafter, his persistence ultimately overcame IAS founding director Abraham Flexner's resistance to building a home for the IAS.

That love of buildings may have been inherited from his grandfather, a Norwegian woodworker who immigrated to America and built a series of farms in Wisconsin, culminating in a beautifully crafted farmhouse now known as the Veblen Farmstead in Minnesota, where Oswald's father and famous uncle Thorstein grew up. Veblen's interest in buildings was surely further nurtured during his graduate and post-graduate years at the University of Chicago from 1900 to 1905, a time when great Chicago architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were influencing the future of architecture worldwide.

One building that may have caught Veblen's attention was Yerkes Observatory, built in 1897 by the University of Chicago. When Einstein traveled to America in 1921, this is one of the places he visited.

Located safely beyond the reach of big city lights, two hours north of Chicago in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, it was a revolutionary building in its time, combining telescopes with research and lab space in the same structure. Called "the birthplace of astrophysics," it still holds the largest refracting telescope in the world. Like the Institute for Advanced Study, whose beginnings and growth Veblen would greatly influence 30 years later, Yerkes was an elite academic enclave surrounded by nature on the outskirts of a small town.

It happens to be where I grew up, my father having been an astronomer there, and director for a stretch. When the University of Chicago closed Yerkes Observatory earlier this fall, it became like Veblen House, a historic building dependent on a nonprofit to imbue it with a new vision and a new life. That's when it occurred to me to look more closely for a connection between these two legacies.

That connection comes most clearly through astronomer George E. Hale, founder of Yerkes Observatory and faculty member at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1905.

Born 12 years before Veblen, in 1868, Hale seems the very sort of kindred spirit Veblen would have been drawn to during their overlapping years at the University of Chicago. An extraordinary visionary, Hale had already founded a world-class observatory and would go on to found two more.

Wikipedia describes Hale as "a prolific organizer who helped create a number of astronomical institutions, societies and journals. Hale also played a central role in developing the California Institute of Technology into a leading research university." A "prolific organizer" who "played a central role"?  Veblen's legacy is often described in similar terms.

Hale and Veblen also shared a love of the outdoors. Hands-on types, they did not shy away from primitive conditions. Veblen's work for the military during WWI, studying the trajectories of artillery shells on horseback in the snowbound fields of Aberdeen Proving Grounds, shares a rugged, pioneer quality with Hale's experience installing the first telescope on a remote mountain in California twelve years before:

The story of the pioneer days on that mountain, when the astronomers lived under primitive conditions and all supplies had to be transported by burro and mule, has been dramatically told by Hale’s colleague and successor as director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, Walter Adams. He describes Hale’s insight, courage, and enthusiasm and his unexpected reaction to the novel conditions:  

Apparently combined with a deep-seated love of nature in every form was the spirit of the pioneer, whose greatest joy is the adventure of starting with little and taking an active personal part in every phase of creation and growth. 

When both Hale and Veblen left the U. of Chicago in 1905, Hale moved west to Mount Wilson Observatory, while Veblen headed east to Princeton, but some recent internet research shows that they did indeed overlap multiple times thereafter, including on the Council for the National Academy of Sciences from 1926-7. Correspondence available in the Hale archives at Caltech show interactions over several decades. The mathematics/astronomy connection came into play while Veblen was bringing mathematicians together at Aberdeen to improve ballistics calculations for the military. For many who worked with Veblen there, it was a transformative experience, as in this letter W.H. Wright wrote to Hale in October, 1918, from Aberdeen Proving Grounds:

My dear Professor Hale:- It may surprise you to hear from me at this place, but I am here very largely as the result of a letter which you wrote some months ago on my behalf, though this is not the assignment I had in mind when I requested that favor of you. However, it is a most interesting place to be in. A great deal of work is being accomplished here, as you are doubtless aware, but the office is short of men competent to handle the complicated problems involved in the study of the flight and rotation of projectiles, and the work is held up on that account. The problem is one that appeals particularly to astronomers, and Major Veblen who has charge of the Range Firing Section at this post has requested me to look for men who are skillful in the theory and practice of astronomical computing, and has authorized me to endeavor to secure their service. The matter is one of exceptional urgency.

Often, Veblen would be mentioned in Hale's correspondence as a candidate for this or that committee. A letter from Gano Dunn to Hale in December, 1925, related to postwar fundraising efforts for science in collaboration with Herbert Hoover, gives a memorable description of Veblen:

I have only a good report for Veblen. He is all that you say altho rather academic in experience and point of view. I am not sure however that this will not be an asset instead of a liability, for I know of few who give so much the impression of a sincere and distinguished intellectually competent highbrow as he. And the keynote of our song is "money for the highbrows". 

Though there was clear connection between Hale and Veblen at various points in their careers as they worked to advance their respective fields and science in general, it's still unknown whether Yerkes Observatory, an extraordinary edifice rising out of the Wisconsin prairie,  itself informed Veblen's vision for what later became the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

William Albert Hiltner Turns 100

A bit of a personal note. My father, William Albert Hiltner, turns 100 today. (He's on the far left in the photo.) I wish he were still around to celebrate it, but even though he died 23 years ago, the day still has meaning.

Somewhat akin to Oswald Veblen, he became a prominent academic after growing up in midwest farm country, a descendent of farmers and carpenters. Whereas Veblen went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, my father got his first job there some 40 years later, first as an instructor and later as professor of astronomy. In the 1940s, that meant moving to Wisconsin, where U of Chicago had its world famous Yerkes Observatory, with its largest of refracting telescopes and clear, "photometric" winter skies making it a center of research. There's a Wisconsin connection for the Veblens, it having been where Oswald's grandparents first settled after immigrating from Norway. Also like Veblen, my father assumed leadership roles, first as director of Yerkes and later as head of AURA, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

He loved the outdoors, sailing, and took us on whitewater canoeing trips in northern Wisconsin even though he didn't know how to swim. Some of my fonder memories are of volunteers working together to get the piers and tents ready each year for girl scouts at a camp in northern Wisconsin--the sort of hands-on group effort Veblen may have been getting at when he'd organize colleagues for ventures into the Institute woods to clear brush. Such group effort is rarer today, removed as we are several generations more from the barn raisings of America's rural past.

Among other parallels was the influence that work for the military had on my father's approach to science. This is described in an online bio at the American Astronomical Society website:

"During World War II Al was engaged in the production of front surface mirrors, and in military optics design and modeling, an experience which influenced his later interest in astronomical instrumentation." 

Veblen's vision for an institute for advanced study was influenced by the informal atmosphere he found while working at a military proving grounds to improve ballistics during WWI. It was also the vast computations required to create trajectory tables for artillery that gave Veblen an appreciation for early computer designs.

My father's passion for his work extended from research, to teaching, to the hands-on aspects of instrument design. He maintained a youthfulness and inquisitiveness to the end, learning to swim at age 64, and spending the last seven years of his life as project manager for the Magellan Project, designing twin telescopes to be built on a mountain in Chile. 

These qualities are shared by Veblen, who made important contributions to mathematics but also lent early support to computer research, at a time when the potential of computers was far from obvious. Quoting from Deane Montgomery's obituary for Veblen in the Bulletin of American Mathematics, 

"Veblen remained rather youthful in his point of view to the end, and he was often amused by the comments of younger but aging men to the effect that the great period for this or that was gone forever. He did not believe it. Possibly part of his youthful attitude came from his interest in youth; he was firmly convinced that a great part of the mathematical lifeblood of the Institute was in the flow of young mathematicians through it."

It's this forward looking point of view, this capacity to see a path forwards and willingness to take on all the obstacles in that path, that I most admire in these men, and those who are working together to preserve and repurpose the house and farmstead the Veblens left to the public trust.