Remembering Chandler Davis, two years later

"I'll meet you on some other barricade!"

Nov 06, 2024

Chandler Davis and his wife, Natalie Zemon Davis, © University of Toronto; from the Azat Miftakhov Committee website.

It is not OK to give up on a problem or a cause just because the struggle is difficult.1

Chandler Davis "was a polymathic mathematician and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, where he taught for 30 years. He was also a poet, composer, science-fiction writer, and lifelong fighter for political, academic, and intellectual freedom. He once advised: 'In mathematics and in life, it is not OK to give up on a problem or a cause just because the struggle is difficult." He "was part of what he described as a 'band of rebels' within the mathematical community that helped establish the Association for Women in Mathematics and the National Association of Mathematicians for underrepresented minorities, and he was an original member of Science for the People…"2

Here is how I remember my first encounter with Chandler Davis. It is 1986, and Chandler is standing at the entrance to the conference center in Berkeley where the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians is taking place, handing out leaflets, I don't know about what. I ask him, "Are you Chandler Davis?" and he responds in the affirmative. My mental image of the encounter is still vivid, though fragmentary, and the face is recognizably Chandler's.

Why had I asked that unfamiliar figure with the leaflets to identify himself? My best explanation is that I had spoken to someone I knew about the Science for Nicaragua program that I had been organizing with Science for the People in Cambridge — at the time I was actively planning the departure of the first SfN cooperants — and that person had advised me to talk to Chandler and had told me where to find him. Such was the improbable beginning of a friendship that lasted, almost uninterrupted, until his death a few weeks ago.3

Science for the People shut its operations abruptly in 1990. Although Chandler and I must have met periodically over the next few years — at the beginning of my year-long exchange in 1989 with the USSR Academy of Sciences I unexpectedly ran into him in the breakfast room at the Akademicheskaya Hotel in Moscow — our first exchange that I can trace dates to early 1992. In 1989 Igor Shafarevich — internationally famous Russian mathematician, dissident, friend of Andrei Sakharov — had published an article entitled "Russophobia," that developed a theory of the "small people" who undermined great nations, starting from the English revolution of the 17th century. In the 20th century Shafarevich opined that the Jews had been the "small people" who had ruined Russia.4 This revelation of his opinions, in a text that had been circulating for years before glasnost allowed its publication, shocked his supporters in the mathematical community. For decades they had admired his dissident writings while ignoring that his opposition to the Soviet system was only one facet of his disdain for modernity in general, and his apparent nostalgia for monarchy. Mathematicians wrote letters to denounce him and the National Academy of Sciences called on him to resign his foreign membership. His writings naturally appalled me, but I was also appalled by the hypocrisy of my colleagues, who had tolerated him as a reactionary but drew the line at his anti-semitism, and by the double standard of the NAS, that had never asked members like William Shockley and the Israeli physicist and politician Yuval Ne'eman to resign in spite of their outspoken and well-documented racism.

Over several years I had shared these thoughts with Chandler. He encouraged me to make them public in a letter to the Mathematical Intelligencer — the bi-monthly mathematical culture magazine of which Chandler was editor-in-chief. In January 1992 he wrote to me to inform me that the Intelligencer would publish a letter later that year, calling on the magazine to "speak out" against Shafarevich. He suggested that "the moment has come" for me to make my point, which I did in a letter published in the January 1993 issue.

A few years later, when Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal published their book Fashionable Nonsense, Chandler encouraged me to extract 2500 words from my disorganized thoughts, and forced me to fashion them into a coherent essay, as a contribution to the kind of open-ended exchange about the 1990s Science Wars that only the Intelligencer, under Chandler's leadership, was willing to risk.

In this way Chandler gently but firmly nudged me into making my activism part of my professional life, and welcomed me into his small but cozy circle of mathematicians willing to take responsibility, politically and otherwise, for the direction of the profession.5 Looking back over the messages we exchanged— I've preserved more than 3000 (!) but there must have been many more — I find a practically exhaustive record of 30 years of controversies and struggles. Among the subjects raised: Science Wars, Samuel P. Huntington, "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics, mathematical platonism, militarism and military contracts at universities, Grigori Perelman's refusal of prizes for his solution of the Poincaré conjecture, finance mathematics and the 2008 crash, anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, theology of mathematics, the NSA, and futurology. Practically every text I published on any of these topics had first been sent to Chandler for improvement.

Chandler was one of the few mathematicians who consistently supported Palestinian rights and was willing not only to say so but to take action, in spite of the risks. The question of Palestine was the topic that, more frequently than any other, was present in our exchanges. Chandler and I shared our frustration with the mathematical establishment that was willing to take stands in support of human rights everywhere except Palestine. He was one of five invited foreign speakers in 1993 at the First Annual Conference of the Palestinian Society of Mathematical Sciences, held at Birzeit University. A year later we were exchanging worries that the International Congress of Mathematicians would be held in 2002 in Jerusalem. To explain why this would have been the wrong thing to do,6 I can do no better than to quote the e-mail Chandler sent to 11 colleagues in 1997:

The Israeli mathematicians have held a number of successful international meetings, and the strength of their domestic mathematical community justifies them in working to hold more.
…To hold an international meeting in Jerusalem, Israel, however, is quite another matter. Formally it is wrong. It would put the sponsors in a partisan position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jerusalem is, to world diplomacy, not an Israeli city; most countries have persisted in declining invitations from Israel to locate their embassies to Israel there, for that reason. To me, the Israeli mathematicians have no more right to invite us to hold an ICM in Jerusalem than in Damascus.
But never mind legalisms. Just beyond the one-way armed barrier around Jerusalem are mathematicians who are not allowed to travel from one province to another of their own country without arbitrary, unpredictable roadblocks, who need
permission of a foreign occupying power for each trip abroad, who are subject to frequent closings of their universities by administrative order of the occupier-- and who mostly must not cross into Jerusalem (though some of them were born there).
What are we being asked to do? Rejoice in the doubtless pleasant comforts provided to us by Israeli hosts and wave to the Palestinians through the barbed wire?

Fifteen years later, when I visited Chandler in Toronto, he invited me to lunch with his friends from the local branch of Faculty for Palestine (F4P), whom he joined for weekly vigils, at the age of 86, holding signs or distributing leaflets, as he had in Berkeley in 1986.

In the fall of 2020, Chandler and I joined with five European mathematicians in publishing a statement in Scientific American, entitled "When Scientists Become Political Dissenters," drawing attention to the cases of three scientists — a Turk, a Palestinian, and a Russian — who were subject to political repression. The first two eventually recovered their freedom, but Azat Miftakhov, a Russian doctoral student in mathematics, was sentenced, a month after the publication of our statement, to six years7 in a penal colony. The Azat Miftakhov Committee, formed in response to this outrageous verdict, kept the awareness of Miftakhov's situation alive in the mathematics community, especially by organizing Azat Miftakhov Days — online international mathematics conferences — in Miftakhov's honor. Chandler, of course, a former political prisoner in the United States, forced to move to Canada because he was blacklisted in his home country, was one of the founding members of the Azat Miftakhov Committee.

When word first reached me in 2017 of plans to revive Science for the People, I also learned that the organization had never completely disappeared. Many of the original members, including Chandler, had kept SftP alive, visible to those in the know, as a listserv hosted at the University of Vermont. I signed up briefly and, although I decided the listserv had outlived its usefulness as soon as SftP's new incarnation as magazine and activist organization was fully established, I more than once had the opportunity to witness Chandler's efforts to keep the discussion on track when it risked losing focus.

I last saw Chandler in person at the SftP re-founding meeting in Ann Arbor in February 2018. I last saw him virtually on July 6, 2022, opening the second Azat Miftakhov Days panel on human rights with welcoming remarks, read from his bed at Bridgepoint Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto.8 Just one month later, still in the hospital, he sent an email to a few dozen of his friends. The subject line — "on not going gentle" — could not have been clearer. In a few short paragraphs he explained what was happening and how his "body won't cooperate." His message ended: "You may not be hearing from me apart from the occasional group mailing like this one." The sad news arrived, inevitably, in a message from Chandler's wife, the well-known historian Natalie Zemon Davis, on September 26, 2022.

When he was editor-in-chief of the Mathematical Intelligencer, Chandler repeatedly used his position to encourage extended debate on themes that most other publications found too controversial. In late 2009, as he prepared to take on the very topical controversy of financial mathematics, Chandler invited me to submit an article on the subject. By June of 2010, I realized that I was not prepared to contribute usefully to the debate.9 Chandler told me no apology was necessary, and wrote: "I'll meet you on some other barricade!"10 It's terribly hard to accept that we won't be meeting again. But there will be more barricades, and I guarantee that Chandler's example will be present to my mind on each of them.

Silicon Reckoner

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