In memoriam: Basil Gordon
Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, 1931 – 2012

Basil Gordon
Basil Gordon was born on December 23, 1931, and died 80 years later on January 12, 2012. He grew up in Baltimore and attended Johns Hopkins University where he received his master's degree in mathematics in 1953. While still an undergraduate, he spent a year in Hamburg, studying with the great algebraists Emil Artin and Ernst Witt. He had studied German and was fluent in it, an asset that also served him well later. In 1956, he received his PhD from Caltech under the supervision of the number theorist Tom Apostol. Gordon's thesis on Tauberian Theorems in number theory set him on a course of continuing contributions to the field for the rest of his life, the latest being work with his former student Richard MacIntosh completed just last year. Gordon spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow teaching at Caltech and then was offered a position at UCLA, where he looked forward to working with Ernst Straus and Ted Motzkin to whom he attributed a great part of the department's attraction for him.

But his move to UCLA was delayed. Gordon was drafted into the Army. Despite appeals from some of the department's most influential members, he was destined to serve a full two-year tour of duty. While serving he was required to hike extensively, an activity which he later claimed instilled a lifelong love of taking walks and thinking about mathematics and also poetry, one of his enduring enthusiasms. He was first assigned to ordinary infantry duties as were all draftees who had filled out the entrance questionnaire and checked 'no' to the questions about high school graduation and bachelor's degrees, credentials which he had bypassed.

The Army soon realized it could use Gordon for a project on a new mobile battlefield computer (just small enough to fit on a truck). Later they found a higher calling for him, moving him to Huntsville, Alabama, where his expertise in celestial mechanics was an asset in orbital calculations for Explorer I, America's first successful effort to launch a satellite. Not only had he taken a celestial mechanics course from C.L. Siegel, but Gordon's fluency in German enabled him to work closely with the group of German scientists at Huntsville. The Army got a very good deal with Gordon.

Arriving at UCLA in 1959, Gordon remained there for his entire academic career, becoming a full professor in 1967 and retiring at the end of 1992. He was cultured, generous, gentle and above all inspirational to his students, his colleagues, and his collaborators. His academic career exemplified the three ideal areas of accomplishment: teaching, research and service.

Gordon was a superb teacher at all levels, and in 1967 he received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. Undergraduate students loved him, and his graduate students were devoted to him. From 1960 – 1993, he supervised 26 PhD students (more than almost anyone else in the department), and a number of them have gone on to outstanding careers of their own. Overall his mathematical descendants number at least 71, including 40 "grand-students" and five "great-grand-students." He also played an important role in the department by coaching the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition team for many years. It was a natural role for him, stemming from his own interest in and talent for 'problem-solving.' Under Gordon's direction, the UCLA team received its best national ranking of third place in 1968 – 1969. His love of the exam led him to establish the Basil Gordon Prize Endowment in 2004 to reward the best performance of a UCLA mathematics student in the Putnam competition each year.

Gordon's research career focused on the areas of algebra, number theory and combinatorics. He wrote 74 research papers in total, about 20 on his own and the rest with a total of 37 co-authors. (His collaborators included seven of his UCLA colleagues and 10 of his PhD students.) He made fundamental and important contributions in many different areas, including combinatorics (difference sets) and coding theory, algebra and group theory. But he is best known for his work in combinatorial number theory on partitions and partition identities.

The celebrated Rogers-Ramanujan identities had been the object of study for decades by number theorists whose goal was to generalize them, although some experts had publicly abandoned hope. Gordon's papers in the 1960s proving more general results opened up a fruitful and active area of continuing research. In particular his work on "partitions of difference two at a distance" was recognized by Lepowski and others as reflecting some deep properties of affine Lie Algebras, and ultimately led to a vertex operator realization of ŝl(2), which later led to the development of vertex operator theory. Another area essentially opened up by his work was that of plane partitions, which had been touched on early in the 20th century but long remained undeveloped. His breakthrough papers – some with his students, especially Houten – put the subject on the map again at a time when it became crucial for studies by many people in related areas. The authors of "On the work of Basil Gordon" in the 2006 issue of Journal of Combinatorial Theory noted that he "dramatically influenced mathematical research and affected many careers."

Gordon devoted a large part of his life to the profession through his service on mathematical journals. He was a founding editor of the Ramanujan Journal in 1997 and the managing editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics for a number of years. Most importantly he was a co-founder of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A and its co-managing editor for 32 years. His efforts played a key role in affirming its status as the world's premier combinatorial journal.

No remembrance of Basil Gordon would be complete without mention of his lifelong interests in history, poetry, literature, art, popular culture, and especially classical music. To all of these things he brought an encyclopedic memory, broad knowledge and deep thought. A talented pianist, he began studying at The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University starting at eight years of age. He owned three grand pianos, which he played regularly for himself and chamber music with others. He had a huge collection of recorded music and piano sheet music, an indicator of not just his love of music but that he was also a scholar in music, as he was in so many other areas.

To paraphrase one of Gordon's favorite quotes from the movies, by Count Dracula, "He was very wise for one who had lived only one life."

Bruce Rothschild and Alfred Hales

A memorial tribute to Basil Gordon will be held on Sunday, March 25, 2012, 2:00-4:00pm, in the Mathematics Graduate Lounge, MS 6620. A light reception will follow.