Rice History Corner

Remember, I warned you that I might post at unauthorized times this summer. This is one of them.

I feel compelled to talk a little bit about yesterday’s comments, which brought me great happiness. Having spent a couple of decades studying the history of the place where I work, I’m just now beginning to get a sense of the many and deep connections that run through the life of the institution. I think these two comments both illustrate and help preserve these connections. They might seem small–hell, they are small–but I believe it’s this multiplicity of tiny strands that bind us as people and as participants in the project we call Rice. Our shared life, if you will.

First, this: It’s interesting to note from your picture of the Thresher front page, the story on Edward Potter’s retirement as Cashier. The end of the article (which happens to be on the page with the Roger Penrose article) mentions that Patty was to replace Potter as Cashier. Patty retired this year. Full circle. A nice association. Thanks.

Among other things, Patty Ciampi has been a good friend to the Woodson. She’s brought several things to my attention that needed to go into the archives and she bemusedly let me climb up on a ladder and take this little guy off a really, really high shelf in the Cashier’s Office and bring him to his proper home in the library. I can say that there was a significant amount of dust on him.

Next, I truly loved this bit of info from John Polking, which I probably could never have discovered any other way: That “student” you see me with is actually Robert Bryant very early in his career at Rice. Unfortunately, Robert left Rice to go to Duke. Presently he is the Director of the Mathematics Research Institute in Berkeley, CA.

I began to get a sense that I ought to know who this Robert Bryant fellow is, so I immediately went and looked up the Mathematical Research Institute at Berkeley. Here’s a screen shot of Bryant’s bio page (you can zoom in to read it):

Two things instantly jump out at me. First, his office is in Evans Hall, which is named after Griffith C. Evans, one of Rice’s original faculty members.

Evans arrived here as an assistant professor but very quickly rose to full, married a Rice student (Isabel Mary Johns, ’17) and was a trusted colleague of Lovett. He left to head Berkeley’s math department in 1934, convinced that tight Depression-era funding and an institutional commitment to athletics over academics would make it extraordinarily difficult to continue building a first-rate department at Rice. (Amusingly, he was a bit startled to discover that University of California trustees were just as interested in sports as Rice trustees.)

Second, take a look at the first title on his publication list: Bryant, Robert L. and Manno, Gianni and Matveev, Vladimir S. (2008). A solution of a problem of Sophus Lie: normal forms of two-dimensional metrics admitting two projective vector fields. Math. Ann. 340 No.2, 437-463.  As I’m sure all you Edgar Odell Lovett aficionados are aware, Sophus Lie was the Norwegian geometry professor with whom Lovett studied for his doctorate from the University of Leipzig. Here’s his portrait:

And finally, just to bring this back to where it started–with an image on a Rice building– here is the image of Sophus Lie carved into one of the columns of Lovett Hall:

Bonus: The Conference USA baseball tournament is being played at Rice this week. I don’t know what school this team is from. I realize that they were just doing some mundane stretching but from where I was standing it looked like they were dancing. Surprisingly pretty!

Many thanks to those who commented on Monday’s post, especially John Polking.  He pointed out that the bonus picture showed something called Penrose tiles, named for a mathematician who was at Rice briefly in the ’80s. Here they are:

Well, this was the first I’d heard of anything like this. It was interesting enough that I thought there might be something in the files about this guy. It turns out that there’s quite a bit–more than I could sort through today. Having Penrose come to Rice seems to have been quite a big deal. I found several newspaper articles with amusing headlines: “UK Math Whiz Arrives at Rice” and the like. Here he is in his office on campus:

What I can’t quite figure out is how he got here. There’s a good bit of correspondence dealing with specific arrangements for his appointment, much of it with Bill Gordon, who was provost at the time, but I haven’t yet seen anything that explains why he wanted to come. There has to be a reason. If anyone can fill me in, I’d appreciate it. The other thing I wonder about is whose idea it was to use this pattern in Brockman Hall.

There are a couple of good links to Penrose bios in Monday’s comments, but I also found this Thresher article about about him that appeared shortly after he arrived in 1983. (Yes, I know it’s crooked. I was in a hurry.)

Just for kicks, here’s the front page of the same issue. Lots going on! Bad fonts too.

Bonus: Also for kicks, here’s John Polking himself, trying to get a student squared away. The photo is undated but I’d guess it’s the ’80s. I don’t know what’s going on on that chalkboard but it looks ghastly.

Extra Bonus: In the spring, we get crowds of prospective students and their parents. In the summer it changes and there are crowds of school children. Here’s a bunch I ran across yesterday. They are fifth graders who were getting a tour from Susan Troutman of the Rice School Mathematics Project, one of our many great K-12 programs. I really love seeing these bright-eyed kids on campus.

I found a large number of old maps in a History Department storage closet today. (I was happy to discover that the History Department has kept their old stuff in very nice order.) These are the kind of maps that are kept folded inside heavy covers so they look like bound manuscripts when you see them sitting on a shelf. There are a lot of them–just eyeballing it I’d say about a hundred. It makes me wonder if some endowment for the purchase of maps once existed. Here’s one unfolded back in the Woodson with several others sitting on top. Note the perfect white lines where the folds are.

Faculty members used them in the classroom, usually hung on a hook attached to the top rail of the chalkboard. As soon as I realized what I was looking at I remembered this photo of Rice History Professor Floyd Lear standing in front of one:

If you zoom in on this you can see that the folds on the map are very similar to the ones above. (If I can go a bit off topic for a moment (and really, who’s going to stop me?), as I look at this photo again I recall that one of the other things I saw in that storage room was a small wooden podium like the one he’s lecturing from. I wonder if it’s the same one. I’ll check.)

In all honesty, I don’t really think these maps are obsolete. The worst you could fairly say about them is that they’re kind of clunky, but it seems to me that they are actually superior in some ways to the powerpoint slides that have replaced them. For one thing, many of them are simply beautiful.

Bonus:

I mentioned a little while ago that I’d found a bunch of interesting band photos. Those rascals have been up to mischief of one sort or another since the band was formed and it seems that there was often a camera around.

This beauty is labeled “1975.” (Not Rice’s best season, by the way.) I didn’t realize until I scanned it and blew it up that there’s a pig in the shot. Based on this and the lack of shoes on the band members (subtle!), I can only conclude that this was the Arkansas game.

Bonus: While looking for a picture of Hamman Hall’s front door I was reminded of how many new views were created by putting Brockman (the new physics building) in between Hamman and George R. Brown.

Now this is really interesting. It was one of the many events organized for Rice’s Semicentennial–two full days of speakers and panel discussions about the place of women in modern society.

And here’s the Sallyport article about the event. Look at the participants! Quoted in this piece are (among others) Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby, Bruno Bettleheim, Professor Mary Ellen Goodman and Corinne Tsanoff, the politically active wife of Rice professor Radoslav Tsanoff who arrived at Rice in 1916. Zoom in and read it–it’s just great.

I find the language here deeply interesting and well worth exploring further. My sense is that there’s more information about this event in the archives and since it’s directly related to the research I’m doing right now I’m going to start digging next week when I’m back in Houston. I’ll let you know if I find anything good.

Bonus: I’ve been thinking recently about buildings that had signs on them before the recent decision to make them all identifiable. There weren’t many, but there were a few. We’ve already established that the Bonner Lab was marked. I also noticed this the other day:

Update: Marty says in the comments that this must be new and so it is. Here’s a picture I took on May 24, 2011:

I’m not sure yet whether I think the new sign is an improvement or not (I’m leaning towards “not”) but at least now I know why I never noticed it before. This is by far my favorite campus building, by the way.

Well, after a bit of weather anxiety Rice pulled off another successful graduation. Here’s a great shot of the 100th Commencement taken by Campus Photographer Jeff Fitlow. He told me how he did this but I confess I didn’t really understand.

Just for fun let’s have a quick look at an earlier graduation. This batch of images came out of a folder in the the Campus Photographer collection. They’re all undated but I believe they were taken at the same time.

This last one, I admit, gave me a small shiver of pleasure. It’s very nearly perfect. Looks like the ’70s, no?

Summer Hours: I have a lot of catching up to do on my own research which means I won’t  be in the Woodson as frequently as usual, so I’m declaring summer hours. I’ll be posting at least every Monday, Wednesday and Friday but maybe more often than that if I happen to feel like it. Who knows? I’m a complete maniac.

I thought last fall’s Centennial Celebration was absolutely magnificent. The hard work of so many able Rice faculty, staff and administrators made it very nearly perfect. But nobody’s perfect. A faculty member brought in something I’ve never seen before–an umbrella with a typo:

So close!

Special Message to the staff of the Woodson Research Center: Thank you!!!