Do the math: Dr. Banaschewski adds degree
Renowned math genius to be honoured back at Mac after amazing ascent
Like the rest of us, mathematicians must shop for food (after all, you can’t eat quadratic formula; even if you could, La Leche would tell you, quadratic breast milk’s better).
So you might have seen Bernhard Banaschewski, renowned algebraist, studying the vegetables with his hands at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market.
He’s the lean, distinguished — I want to say continental-looking — man with the trim goatee and debonair sideburns, who finds himself in Canada because he could no longer stand to be in Europe after the Second World War.
He finds himself at McMaster (where he is professor emeritus) because of his exceptional work and reputation in algebra, point-free topology, frame theory and ... I could go on, but I already don’t know what I’m talking about.
He finds himself at the market, where he goes weekly, because at 91 he still enjoys cooking.
“I make a good lamb stew,” Bernhard tells me with a smile in his office in the basement of the Burke Science building. “And roasts. Stews and soups mostly.” Traditional central European fare, he says. “But more spicy” from his kitchen than is customary there.
On Thursday, he’ll find himself at convocation receiving an honorary degree from the university he came to in 1955, after an early life spent in the crosshairs of world history.
He was born in Munich to Anne Banaschewski. A remarkable woman, the descendant of a Masurian (Polish) shepherd (“maybe why I like lamb,” says Bernhard) and daughter of a forward-thinking doctor; she achieved a PhD in art history at age 23 in the 1920s, a hard thing for a woman during a hard time for Germany. She fell in love with a Bavarian Catholic, whom the church would not allow to divorce his wife. They had a child anyway.
“But it didn’t work out between them,” says Bernhard. “So I was raised by her, a single mother. When I was five, she said, ‘You are old enough now that you can do something, so she taught me how to dry the dishes. I was so proud.” He wanted to do more.
His mother was a “passionate anti-Nazi” at a time when the Nazis were ascendant. Bernhard started school in 1932 (after they’d moved to Hamburg) and enjoyed it. But then the principal, a social democrat, was “reassigned” and replaced by some “Nazi punk, who educated in the opposite direction.”
Bernhard eventually went to a private school where they taught “Latin as your first language, then classical Greek and finally a living language.” He chose English.
As we talk, amid the papers and books in his office — “The Elements of Set Theory”; “Landscapes of Gustav Klimt”; “Couples” by John Updike — I ask if he still knows those dead tongues. Not as he used to but ... there’s a play in his eyes as the language comes haltingly back; he recites something from the poet Sappho, in ancient Greek.
Strange words pour forth. His face is mesmerizing. Then he translates, roughly: “The moon is descending, and Pleiades in the sky, in the middle of the night, the hour progresses, but I am lying here lonely .... ”
Just before Bernhard finished high school — after the Germans lost at Stalingrad — boys under military age were pressed into service, he in an anti-aircraft barrier. He worked the guidance instrument.
“Teachers actually came into the battery to teach us a reduced curriculum.”
Things got worse. In July 1943, the Allies firebombed Hamburg; the death toll was tens of thousands. The city was all but destroyed.
As he neared 18, Bernhard used all his wiles to delay military service, and just as he would have been sent to the front, he was kept back temporarily for officer training, which he’d singed up for.
By the time he would have gone in earnest, the war was over and he’d been taken prisoner of war. Eventually, life returned to “normal,” if it ever had been. Bernhard shone at mathematics in university, specializing in algebra, and did his doctoral studies under the world-famous Ernst Witt.
“I had promised myself,” Bernhard recalls, “that if I survived (the war), once I got my degree, I would get out of Germany.” He did. He was an incredibly promising and gifted young mathematician. He read the London Times every day and once saw an ad for academic positions.
“Some place called McMaster.” There was an interview. Bernhard was told that the university and the city it was in were “enormously ambitious, with incredible determination but a lousy football team.”
He got the job. This was the mid-1950s. He found out decades later that the job he responded to had already been filled, but they were so impressed, McMaster created a spot for him.
Thus began a great association. Bernhard continued to make strides in algebraic thinking over the decades — topology, category theory — and brought to the university’s math department much international credit. He was chair of mathematics and statistics from 1961 to 1967 and from 1982 to 1987. He received an honorary degree from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2000.
(His mother, after the war, by now in the teaching profession, distinguished herself as an innovator in education. Bernhard never met his father, but did find out he was arrested for political activism in the late 1930s and eventually put in a concentration camp, but survived. He died of old age in Vienna in 1960, before Bernhard could find him.)
His international colleagues commemorated his 90th birthday last year with a world math conference, again in Cape Town.
It’s amazing the kind of people you bump into at the farmer’s market. It’s a good thing mathematicians have to eat. Congratulations, Dr. Banaschewski.