Talk:Stanley Tennenbaum

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You might consider adding some the fascinating material from http://www.math.cornell.edu/~anil/highereducation.html by Stanley's friend Prof. Nerode of Cornell.

Stanley Tennenbaum

Stan came from high school in Cincinnati to the Hutchins Great Books Program and graduated with a Ph. B. a couple of years before I did. He was five years my senior, but my contemporary in entering mathematics.. After getting his Ph.B. Stan never got himself organized enough to finish courses in the graduate school, much less to get a degree beyond the Hutchins college Ph.B. But he did significant mathematical work then and later. Why did he not get an advanced degree? He was a true intellectual, a true product of the Hutchins' college as Hutchins had intended it. In that college, which I also went through without attending classes, there was no obligation to attend classes as an undergraduate, only an obligation to take a six hour exam in each course at the end of the year. Stan took advantage of this freedom and instead spent a lot of time reading the great books, in intellectual discussions with Chicago luminaries such as Robert Hutchins, Joe Schwab, Leo Strauss, Mortimer Adler, Bruno Bettleheim, and all others with an interest in the philosophy, psychology, and practice of education at all levels, an endless list. In graduate school he had none of the habits for success in a mathematics department such as attending classes, doing homework, or taking tests. I had the same habits he had, from the same source, for my first quarter in graduate school, but his habits were unchanged forever. He married Carol and had his first son early, and always supported them with a variety of jobs while a student.

There were many true anecdotes about him. One of his jobs was as a night cab driver. I got into his cab on a winter night, and discovered that the windows were completely covered with thick opaque snow, with only an eyehole cleared in front of the driver. This scared me, so I offered to clean the window. But Stanley drove off, saying it was much better to have the limited vision, because other cars would notice it and stay away. This was at night, with lots of traffic. He was fascinated by the idea that limiting information could improve performance. But in this instance...When Marcel Marceau visited Chicago, Stan took his small son to a performance. Stan wanted to meet Marceau, so he told the backstage manager that his son was a great fan and wanted to meet the great man. Marceau loved children, Stan loved children, and they spent the rest of the evening with him. I have not doubt that Stan used such strategies many times. He knew a lot of famous people outside the university that you don't run into on the street. One of the things that surprised me about him was a love of football, acquired in high school. My memory, which may be faulty, is that he played football in high school, but suffered an injury and had to stop. In any case he had the highest intellectual respect for certain football players, who were not very big, possibly not very fast, but out-psyched their opponents. Typical was his admiration for Charley Trippi of Georgia who could wiggle his hips deceptively, misleading pursuers, who then predicted incorrectly his twists and turns and tackled thin air. He was taken with the triumph of brain over brawn.. When Elvis became a sensation among the teenagers, and the rest of us were perplexed at the crowd hysteria we saw on tv, Stan expressed great admiration for Elvis for wiggling his pelvis while performing, saying that it was a great cultural advance that Elvis was a male permitted to express sexuality in the same way as women dancers in our overly inhibited society, a very thoughtful observation.

In 1959 he was the first to show that there were no recursive models of formal arithmetic, improving a corresponding result for set theory of Michael Rabin from 1958. In1963, while under support of one of my federal contracts, Stan proved the independence of Souslin's hypothesis. I was in Princeton at IAS and IDA. We made him an an appointment with Godel so Stan could show him the proof. Stan was understandably nervous, and arrived the day before to have me check the proof, since I had read Cohen's work the day Paul spoke at IAS earlier in the year. He was nervous and took a sleeping pill. I found minor errors. He then asked for dexedrine, which he knew I had. This made me extremely nervous, but I gave him a couple, and he corrected the errors that night before seeing Godel the next day. In his place I would not have taken a sedative and a stimulant at the same time, but that was Stan! Later, during and after a visit to Penn, he proved, with Solovay, the consistency of the Souslin hypothesis. These were the first concrete independence result in general mathematics after Paul Cohen's work. Cohen was a younger fellow student of ours at Chicago, who learned logic by osmosis while renting a room in Stan's house, where logicians and logic students congregated a decade earlier.

Stan always had a doubtful relation to MacLane, probably because Stan had never finished his courses at Chicago. When we were students, Stan said that whenever he had told Saunders anything, Saunders always checked with me afterwards to make sure it was right. It always was right, but it annoyed Stan greatly. Here is a Peter Freyd anecdote that illustrates this. "A story about the two of them: in 1964. I called Mac Lane in the middle of the summer to ask him why he was blocking a a one-year visitorship for Stanley in the Penn Philosophy department. (I had concluded that the Provost's friendship with Saunders must be obstructing the appointment. The Provost -- perhaps on orders from Saunders -- hadn't told me that there was even an obstruction, never mind that it came from Saunders.) In a somewhat heated conversation, Saunders said at one point that the Tennenbaum he knew could not possibly have proved the independence of the Suslin conjecture. I asked if I could quote him. Long pause. He then responded that he would call the Provost and undo the obstruction. Stanley's visit was actually a great success." Stan's proof, as I said earlier had been verified already by no less than Godel, but Saunders was not aware of this. He always underestimated Stan.

Stan was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He was sure that that Freeman Dyson was part of a secret U S government sponsored group which controlled world weather and much of world affairs. He believed that this organization started in World War II with MacLane's deployment to an applied mathematics group at Columbia in New York City, also involving the man who brought me to Cornell, J. Barkely Rosser, who was very much involved with the military at a very high level. He viewed my work for many US military organizations over many years as cover for my participation in this project. My wife Sally's introduction to this was when she was walking on the Arts quad at Cornell and encountered Stan and said conversationally "It's a nice day". His reply was "and do you know why", proceeding to launch into this tale, hoping she would let something "slip" I could not disabuse him of these thoughts. He kept trying to trip me up into inadvertantly revealing the conspiracy. Since I did work for various agencies, whenever I said I was not at liberty to discuss some topic, he immediately interpreted this as protecting the "secret". Stan had a vivid imagination.

Stan was a truly exceptional teacher. In the early days he often taught at the night school of the downtown college of the University of Chicago. Later, at Cornell, I arranged for him to come during summers to teach prospective and established high school teachers in a program sponsored by Shell Oil. After the initial Souslin work, he got a tenure position at Rochester, without having an advanced degree, through the efforts of a brave chairman, Len Gillman, and references that I suggested from those few who then understood his work at that time. He stayed there for awhile, then got upset at a faculty meeting with then President Wallace, whom he had known at Chicago as a Statistics professor, walked to the front, spit on the President's shoes in contempt, left the meeting, and resigned from the University.

He left the academic community altogether to become a remarkably unsuccessful entrepreneur. He was a great teacher and felt he could find a mechanism for transferring this expertise to others in a way that would give him an income. But this did not happen. He never held another tenured position. He became entirely peripetetic, with visiting positions or no position for the rest of his life. He greatly valued his lifelong friendship with Hutchins. He told me a few years ago that the difference between him and me is that I grew up and he did not. His peregrinations were quite wild. After leaving Rochester, he came back and invited a large number of mathematicians to a meeting in a Rochester motel without informing the Rochester mathematics department. Afterwards, he sent the the department the bill. Instead of refusing to pay, as I would or you would, that ever kind Chairman Gail Young paid the bill. Finally, over his life he helped a great many people in their lives, giving freely of his time and energy whenever needed.

He had many excellent ideas for educational projects. People he knew occasionally gave him money to try to bring them to reality. It never happened. I don't think he had any idea how hard it is to make a concrete business plan for a venture which will convince backers that there would be a stream of income. He thought that an inspiring idea and a sketch of a plan would be enough to get interested parties to invest. It is not as easy as that. I would guess he acquired this excessive optimism from Hutchins, who had a motto that "ideas have consequences". This enthusiasm was an endearing quality to all who knew him. Another of his sterling qualities was that whenever anyone was in trouble, he would rush to their aid. If they needed money, he would borrow it from someone else and give it to them. If they required his time or professional help, he would offer it. This is one of the reasons he was so beloved by his friends.

Such was the fate of my fellow logic students in the year I entered.

My closest friend in the Hutchins college and in graduate school was Ed Nelson, who has spent his career at Princeton as a Professor of analysis and probability. He also made later contributions to nonstandard models of set theory and ultrafinitistic mathematics. I met him in 1948-9 when I was still in Hutchins' college. He had come in from a Roman Lycèe, taken the exams that are given when you entered Chicago, and placed out of all the courses. He was awarded his bachelor's degree without taking any of the required courses. Time magazine carried a picture of him next to a pile of all the required books he did not have to read, a pile nearly as tall as he was. He was best man at my first wedding. At that time he was not interested in logic. I had not seen him for a long time, we met again at the Tennenbaum memorial at CUNY in April of 2006. He said he was now a great-grandfather. http://www.math.cornell.edu/~anil/highereducation.html 173.165.48.227 (talk) 13:29, 4 April 2014 (UTC)