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Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg
A Memory of a Favorite Professor
I was in my last year of graduate school at The School of Advanced Technology. At this point I had already met the requirements for receiving my degree: thesis, etc. and only had to accumulate a few additional course credits. As I could take any course I desired, I chose this course, as I had met Stefan in a social setting and knew that he was certainly a genius, in the truest sense of the word. I had already known that he was an IBM Fellow (the highest technical distinction IBM could bestow), a conductor (assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at The New York Philharmonic), former president of The Mannes School of Music, mathematician, scholar and a lawyer. (He was bored in his late forties, I think, and then decided to get a law degree, ho hum). Stefan would write a very, very large equation on three blackboards (in a large rectangular classroom) with the = sign smack dab in the middle of the equation (very similar to the image below). There were sparse students in this class, maybe eight to twelve. We never did really pay attention to each other anyway as our eyes were glued to Stefan in the front of the classroom. Every Saturday morning at nine, three hours of lecturing, with not one break. He probably drove up from Manhattan a couple of hours away that morning. I am not sure he ever slept. As I remember there was no practical knowledge in the class except to attempt to enable you with analytical thinking and reasoning skills. It was amazing just watching him quickly writing the equation on the blackboard from memory, no notes. He would have about seventy-five percent of it done when the class started as it took awhile to write it on the blackboard. I, among others, used to get there very early to watch him write it on the blackboard. He never made use of any notes in his three-hour lecture just an outline, I think. I don’t remember the course name but it was part of the Applied Math core of the graduate program.
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