Kwangil Koh
Remarks by Nicholas J. Rose at the memorial service for Kwangil Koh on Feb. 15, 2009We are here today to celebrate the life of Kwangil Koh. He died so unexpectedly and so suddenly that many of us are still in shock. Our deepest condolences go to Kwangil's wife Toni, his children James, Patricia and Debra and to their families and to Kwangil's siblings and their families.
In a sense everyone's life is special. However some seem to be more special than others. Kwangil Koh was one these more special people.
I first met Gil in 1968 when I came to State to be interviewed for the department head position. Gil was an algebraist and I was interested in analysis and differential equations. I gave a talk about control theory and used the concept of semi-group in my talk. Afterwards, Gil complimented me on my talk. I think he felt that any analyst who could use semi-group in his talk couldn't be all bad.
A year or so later we both attended the annual math society meeting in January. I forget where the conference was held, perhaps Atlanta. The second day we were there I was walking through the lobby and was surprised to hear my name being paged. It turned out that Gil was very sick. We tried to get the Hotel Doctor but we had to wait too long. I didn't want to take any chances so I got an ambulance and took him to the hospital. He remained there for several hours. They determined he probably had the twenty four hour flu. They medicated him and sent him back to the hotel. He got better rapidly. Gil said, exaggerating a bit, that I saved his life. Of course I didn't. But I can say, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, that this was the start of a beautiful friendship.
All of Kwangil's friends and colleagues called him Gil. There was one exception, Buzz Hentz, a chemistry professor, thought with the name KOH he really should be in the chemistry department and referred to him as Dr. Potassium Hydroxide.
Gil was very proud of his family, and with good reason. His wife Toni is an accomplished business woman. Some years ago she had a children's clothing shop in Crabtree Mall. She gave several of the faculty children an opportunity to earn a few dollars and learn a little bit about life in the real world. His son James heads a Research lab at Duke involved in genetics, genomics and cancer research. Some years ago, James was at the University of Vermont at the same time my son John was finishing up his doctorate in Microbiology. James, echoing the same friendliness and consideration as his dad, was very kind and helpful to John, Gil was also very proud his two daughters, Debra and Patricia. They both went through the long and rigorous training to be lawyers. They now are have a successful practice in the D.C area. It is a sorrow that Gil could not live long enough to see his grandchildren who are very likely to continue the family tradition of success and service.
Gil had a distinguished professional career..When Gil came to State in 1964 after getting his Ph.D. from UNC at Chapel Hill, he was the first algebraist in the department. He entered a department with a fledgling doctoral program and was a large factor in getting it up and going. The first of his eleven PhD students graduated in 1967, the last in 1990, a span of some 33 productive years. He helped to design all of the algebra courses and was instrumental in getting other algebraists to join the department. Now the department has a very active and productive Algebra group, When an external evaluation committee examined the department last year, it specifically mentioned the strength and renown of the algebraists , due in no small measure to Gil's efforts. Gil's research was in ring theory, number theory, group theory and topological algebra. In November 2002 a Mid-Atlantic Algebra Conference was held in honor of the retirement of Kwangil Koh and his fellow algebraist Jiang Luh, A very nice way to celebrate their careers..
While I was department head Gil was an ideal faculty member. He did all the things that a faculty member was supposed to do. He always kept his office hours. He took his teaching seriously, Although he was foreign born, he took extraordinary efforts to speak distinctly and made sure that the students understood him. In 9 years as a department head I never received a single complaint about Gil's teaching or anything else for that matter. He worked with many other faculty members particularly with new algebraists in the department. Gil never complained if we needed him to teach some undergraduate course that he hadn't taught before. In fact he liked to teach new courses. Besides undergraduate and graduate abstract algebra courses and graduate seminars, he taught various levels of calculus, finite mathematics, probability, linear algebra and number theory.
For a while the 1970's we had a poker group of 6 or 7 members of the math dept including Gil and me. We rotated hosting the poker among the players. It was customary at the end of the evening to provide a few snacks. One time when I was the host, my wife Muriel, set out a few snacks for us. Gil sampled one and looking at the table told my wife "this is a feast for the eyes as well as the palette". Muriel has had a soft spot for Gil ever since.
For many years, perhaps 15 or so, a group of us in the mathematics department would have lunch together on a regular basis. The group included Gil, me, Ernie Stitzinger, Carl Meyer, Jeff Scroggs and sometimes Bob White, Michael Shearer and Tim Kelley also Joe Marlin and Richard Chandler before they retired. We usually went to the Chinese Restaurant and then to the coffee shop. In the last year or two, when Friday came around, Gil would suggest that we have Pizza instead of Chinese food. It became a custom for us. The last few Fridays, in honor of Gil, we have continued the Pizza tradition.
During the lunches and afterwards at the coffee shop we talked about everything; sports, politics, mathematics, education, health and whatever. We enjoyed the fellowship and arguments and nobody ever got angry. After I retired I continued to come to the office several times a week and after Gil retired he still came to the office every day. We both looked forward to lunch time. In our political discussions, you would probably put me on the left of the political spectrum, others were on the right and others libertarians. Gil was not so easy to pigeonhole. He was on the liberal side of many issues. However he worried about government having too much power. He thought government programs should be carefully focussed to accomplish some goal so as to not unnecessarily interfere into peoples lives.
It happened that one of Carl Meyer's students made a study of Sports prediction models. In order to see how these models compared with predictions by people, several of us, Gil included, even some of our wives, put in our predictions for the winners of games in the National Football year this past season. The final results for this season were just released. Gil got .616 correct. I'm sure Gil would have noticed that this is very close to the reciprocal of the golden mean.
A few years back, Gil bought a new MIni-Cooper. He loved that car and it was a very nice car. For several years Joe Marlin had a restaurant in Holly Springs. We sometimes went there for lunch. Gil offered to drive Stitz and me in his new car, he said he had room for up to four. Stitz insisted that I sit in the front seat , I think because of my advanced age. Gil was very comfortable driving, I was reasonably comfortable in the front seat, but Stitz had to sit sideways on the back seat for the entire trip. We concluded that it was a perfect car, that is, for someone of Gil's stature. Speaking of this car, a year or so ago, Gil got caught speeding going down Glenwood Avenue toward Crabtree Valley in his MIni-Cooper. I would guess that this was the only law Gil broke in his entire life. At such times, It was nice to have a pair of daughters who were lawyers. Helped by the fact that Gil had an otherwise spotless driving record, they managed to get it settled without going to court. During the past five or six years when Gil wasn't working on mathematics he read extensively about modern physics. He was just interested in learning new things. He loved reading the physics lectures of Richard Feynmann, famous Cal Tech Nobelist. On Gil's home page, besides the usual information, you would have probably been surprised to see that he had some diagrams concerning Schrodinger's Cat. Schrodinger described a thought experiment involving a cat in a box to illustrate the dichotomy between the wave and quantum view of matter. Lately when I came to pick him up for lunch in this office I found he was studying the theory of quantum computing, which would use the quantum states of atoms as the basic building blocks of a computer. He tried to explain to me about qubits, Bloch Spheres and other such things.
We all miss Gil very much. He was good-natured, curious about everything, and seldom complained about anything. A pleasure to have around.
As time marches inexorably on, we are forced to face the harsh reality of Gil's mortality, as well as our own. He has now moved on to that ultimate seminar in the heavens that awaits us all.
Farewell good friend, farewell.