Video recording of my Skolem Lecture on The Birth of Binary

 A video recording of my Skolem Lecture in Oslo on the Birth of Binary is now available here.

The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic

The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent translation and edition (with British intellectual historian Lloyd Strickland) of mostly unpublished works on binary by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) establishes Leibniz as the key progenitor of the arithmetic used in today’s communications and computing technologies. I will review Leibniz’s research on binary notation, his increasingly sophisticated algorithms for binary arithmetic, his development of some rudiments of Boolean algebra to describe his calculus symbolically, his improvisation of a concatenation semigroup to describe patterns in bit strings, his plans for two different binary calculators, and his invention of what we now call hexadecimal notation, complete with four different notations for the hex digits, including the one in general use today. I will also comment on Leibniz’s efforts to universalize his invention by connecting it to Christian and Chinese traditions.

 

Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, holds AB and PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. A member of the Harvard faculty since 1974, he has helped launch thousands of Harvard undergraduates, including both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, into careers in computer science. Principal architect of Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program, he served as Dean of Harvard College and interim dean of Harvard’s Engineering School and was the recipient of the IEEE’s 2021 Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. His recent books include an edited collection of classic computer science papers, “Ideas that Created the Future,” as well as “Leibniz on Binary” with Lloyd Strickland, both published by MIT Press.

Voter Suppression, Harvard-Style

(This piece is jointly authored by Harry Lewis and Bill Gasarch, who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.)

There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government.

 

Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominating committee curates a slate of candidates, from which alumni make their selections.

 

But an alternative route to get on the Harvard ballot exists, at least in theory. So-called “petition” candidates have always been rare—but after several climate activists were elected in 2020, the rules were changed to make it even harder. Among other things, the number of petitions to get on the ballot was raised by a factor of fifteen, to more than three thousand. 

 

This year, noted civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate, concerned about freedom of expression at Harvard, is trying to make it onto the ballot. 

 

The authors are computer scientists. We are neither technologically naïve nor afraid of computers. Harry has long been concerned about issues of student freedom and Harvard governance, and suggested to Bill, Harry’s sometime PhD student, that he sign Silverglate’s petition. This is an account of Bill’s trip through the resulting electronic purgatory.

 

To add your name, you have to fill out a web form. To access the web form, you need a HarvardKey. To get a HarvardKey, you have to fill out another web form. So far, so good.

 

The HarvardKey web form wanted Bill’s 10-digit HAA ID, which he was told to find on the address sticker of his copy of a recent Harvard Magazine (sent to all alumni). Bill had one handy, so he looked and found … a 9-digit number. He tried entering that number—no luck. He noticed it began with three 0s, and tried adding a fourth—that did not work either. 

 

The web form had a number to call. Someone answered, and said some information would be needed before dealing with digits. Name (fine). Year of degree (fine). MIDDLE name (well, fine, though no one but Bill’s mother ever used it, and only when indignant). Date of birth (well, OK, but now we’re getting into territory we don’t casually reveal any more). When he got his MASTER’s degree. Bill did not know—that’s just something Harvard gives en route to the PhD. Turned out he actually didn’t need to know, an estimate was good enough. The person on the phone gave him his HAA ID, which bore no relation to the number on his address sticker. 

 

Let’s pause there. Some people never call tech support because they have never found it helpful to do so. Any such person with a 9-digit address sticker number could not participate in the petition process.

 

Bill entered his HAA ID and received an error message saying that … KEY-5003 was missing. Happily, Bill had kept the support person on the phone (this was not his first rodeo).

 

Missing KEY-5003 turned out to mean that Harvard did not have his email address. He supplied it and was told he would get an email confirmation later in the day.

 

He did get an email later in the day. It listed eleven steps to claim his HarvardKey. Step 6 was to wait for a confirming email (he thought this WAS the confirming email), but after step 5 the system told him he was not in the system and it could not continue.

 

Another call to a support line. No, Bill was told, he has to wait 24 hours to get his email address updated, and would not get a confirming email. Just try tomorrow. Like the email said. Except that it didn’t say that, nor had the person he spoke to on the previous call.

 

Bill waited 24 hours and tried again, and got a little further through the eleven steps—and then was told to wait ANOTHER 24 hours for the account to activate. 

 

24 hours later he tried again, from home, and failed again. Then he went to his office and succeeded—no clue why.

 

Now finally he got to the petition, which required Bill’s graduation year—and Silverglate’s­­, which Bill found but shouldn’t have been needed since this petition was specific to Silverglate.

 

Three days and two phone calls to sign the petition. To be fair, the people Bill spoke to on the phone were kind and helpful. Probably they themselves were struggling with the systems.

 

And we knew already that HAA is technologically challenged. A few weeks ago, it abruptly announced that it could no longer handle email forwarding. After alumni blowback, it just as abruptly announced that it would NOT end its forwarding service—oddly, while cautioning that the service was unlikely ever to work very well. 

 

When election officials want to suppress the vote somewhere, they under-resource the voting process, forcing voters to cross town and wait in long lines. What happened to Bill is so comical that it is hard to imagine that the specifics were intentional. On the other hand, under-resourcing the petitioning process, allowing it to be so defective, misinformed, and hard to use that many people won’t exercise their franchise—isn’t that a form of voter suppression?

 

Why not be true to Harvard’s motto, Veritas, and just post on the web, “For the alumni to choose the Overseers is an anachronism. Today’s alumni voters can’t be trusted to do it wisely. Since we can’t get rid of this system, we are going to make it all but impossible to nominate by petition. Try if you wish, but if you do, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Skolem Lecture on "The Birth of Binary" – 8 December 2022

Following publication of my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of Leibniz's writings on binary arithmetic, I'll be giving the annual Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture at the University of Oslo on December 8, and it will be both live-streamed and recorded. The lecture will be at 1:15pm Oslo time, which is 7:15am EST. Here is the full information, including the Zoom link (I imagine a link to the recording will at some point be posted on the last page linked below):

The 2022 Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture

Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University.

The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic

The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent translation and edition (with British intellectual historian Lloyd Strickland) of mostly unpublished works on binary by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) establishes Leibniz as the key progenitor of the arithmetic used in today’s communications and computing technologies. I will review Leibniz’s research on binary notation, his increasingly sophisticated algorithms for binary arithmetic, his development of some rudiments of Boolean algebra to describe his calculus symbolically, his improvisation of a concatenation semigroup to describe patterns in bit strings, his plans for two different binary calculators, and his invention of what we now call hexadecimal notation, complete with four different notations for the hex digits, including the one in general use today. I will also comment on Leibniz’s efforts to universalize his invention by connecting it to Christian and Chinese traditions.

Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, holds AB and PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. A member of the Harvard faculty since 1974, he has helped launch thousands of Harvard undergraduates, including both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, into careers in computer science. Principal architect of Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program, he served as Dean of Harvard College and interim dean of Harvard’s Engineering School and was the recipient of the IEEE’s 2021 Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. His recent books include an edited collection of classic computer science papers, “Ideas that Created the Future,” as well as “Leibniz on Binary” with Lloyd Strickland, both published by MIT Press.

Time and place: December 8, 2022, 13:15 –15:00, Georg Sverdrups hus (Universitetsbiblioteket), Blindern, Auditorium 1.

It will be possible to follow the lecture on Zoom:

              https://uio.zoom.us/j/63956167845

Fore more on the Skolem Lecture, see  https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/groups/logic/events/.

Virtue signaling, at the Kennedy School and elsewhere

The imperative to show our commitment to redress social injustices, even if it means overshooting the mark, takes Harvard to positions that are, if not literally indefensible, far beyond what most of the community would be willing to defend. Extreme positions may even offend and injure the very people they are voiced to advance. To declare such a position is "virtue signaling"--broadcasting to some audience our own good intentions, regardless of antipathy such declarations may excite in the general public or the resentment that may result in the affected population.

Some years ago, for example, I was in a faculty meeting where faculty candidates were to be chosen to receive offers. Someone said he would support any set of candidates, as long as at least one was a woman. This way of putting it simultaneously signaled flexibility, virtue, and determination to right a historical injustice. I cringed, and not just because such a stipulation would be, as I understood it, illegal if adopted broadly and not at all what Harvard means when it favors "affirmative action." That would have been enough, but I instinctively glanced around the room, wondering whether the women faculty present for the discussion were pleased to think their male colleagues were devoutly committed to gender diversity on the faculty--or were asking themselves if they had been deemed second-tier intellectually when they themselves were hired and were still thought of that way.

Something of the same strikes me about this scene, captured a couple of weeks ago in the men's room on the second floor of Wexner Hall at the Harvard Kennedy School. (No, I had not made a mistake about where I was; I left and double-checked that I was in the MEN's room, before re-entering to use the urinal.)

As the availability of menstrual products in men's rooms is a new thing, it's fair to assume that the new stocking protocol responds to concerns of the kind voiced in the People Have Periods campaign, showing transgender men menstruating.

Now I don't doubt that some trans men have periods and haven't carried supplies with them, but I doubt it's a common occurrence. Trans men usually stop menstruating within a year of within a year of the time they start on testosterone. (Weiselberg, E., 2022. Menstrual considerations for transgender male and gender diverse adolescents who were assigned female at birth. Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, p.101239.) So this accommodation is for a minority of a minority of a minority--trans men, in the first year of their transition, who have forgotten to carry supplies with them. It would not swell the number much to add a few forgetful nonbinary menstruating individuals who use the men's room when they have to make a choice.

Whatever the number might be, it is surely smaller than the number of people who might benefit from stocking public bathrooms with other items. For example, it must be less than the number who have nicked themselves and just need a bandaid--and have to walk around the corner to CVS to buy a box rather than bleeding in public, bathrooms not having been stocked with free bandaids. Or the number of people who, like me, wish there were sharps receptacles in more bathrooms, because we use syringes, lancets, and subcutaneous needles for medical therapies. (Most such sharps now come with plastic sheaths, but it is still improper to toss them in the paper towel bin, where they are hazardous to custodians. And implanting some devices, such as the Silhouette infusion set, leaves the user with a nastily evil unsheathed needle to get rid of.) 

So the sanitary product display seems to me the essence of virtue signaling--doing something not for what it actually accomplishes but for what it says about the way others feel about the affected group. Now one might counter that yes, it is exactly because trans men are a socially marginalized group, while shavers and diabetics are not, that it is important to make small gestures--such as stocking men's rooms with sanitary products--to show them and everyone else that they are welcome and included.

But there's a problem, and it's the same worry I have about hire-a-woman declarations in faculty meetings. Trans men who have planned ahead may not want to be reminded, and to have others reminded, that they have periods. The publication cited above on this subject says, " [M]enstruation for transgender males, and other gender diverse individuals assigned female at birth, may be anything but celebratory. … Menstruation or the anticipation of menarche for many transgender males is often met with worsening of dysphoria, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. Therefore, to meet the physiologic and psychologic needs of transgender males, one needs to be aware of issues that may be present in relation to menstruation and be knowledgeable on how to medically proceed with sensitivity and respect toward one's gender identity."

In any case, it seems likely to this old-fashioned integrationist that that trans men may generally wish to be treated as men, not as trans men, in the same way I expect that most women faculty wish to be treated by their peers as faculty first and women faculty secondarily. It also seems to me that the most likely result of putting those supplies in the men's room is not that they will be used, but that some bozo will throw them on the floor or into the trash, someone else will discover that and complain to university officials, who will express their outrage and solidarity and promulgate a re-education program on the Harvard community such as we already receive on other social issues affecting the workplace and classroom.

Those who have made the difficult decision to change their gender deserve our support, just as efforts to diversify the faculty are worthy when they do not conflict with deeper principles. Showy public gestures, in the place of more substantive help, are acts of politics more than of kindness. They are ways to get Harvard to stake out its position in American culture wars. I do hope the University can become less political in the future and refocused on academic issues instead.

Of course, it is also possible this was all just a mistake made by a sleepless janitor!

Harvard Alumni: Sign Harvey Silverglate's petition to get on the ballot for the Overseers

 Noted civil libertarian and free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate is trying to be elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. I know Harvey well and have never met a more principled person -- and on top of that, I admire the principles he stands for and his way of defending them, even though we don't always agree on how they should play out in practice. He is exactly the kind of no-BS person who should be on the Board of Overseers to challenge Harvard's authoritarian tendencies and the verbal dreck Harvard too often uses to justify positions that cannot survive rational scrutiny.

Most Overseer nominees are selected by an HAA committee, but there is a process for alumni to nominate additional names to appear on the ballot. That process involves collecting quite a few nominations from alumni. If you hold a Harvard degree and are not currently on the Harvard payroll, you are eligible to add your name to the petitioners.

The link is on Harvey's web site: https://www.harvey4harvard.com/, where you can learn more about him. When you click through to fill out the petition, you need to fill in your own name and degree information (Harvard School and year of degree) as well as Harvey Silverglate's (Harvard Law School, 1967). Please do it now -- he needs more than 3000 signatures over roughly the next 90 days -- and tell your Harvard-educated friends and relatives to do so too!

Upcoming lectures on two recent books

I’ll be a keynote speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) in December. My topic is “Why and How to Teach the Classic Papers,” and I will be describing the experience of reading about 50 classic computer science papers with about 150 computer science students per year. The course is Harvard’s CS191, and I have collected the papers, each with a brief introduction, into an MIT Press volume Ideas That Created the Future, now in its third printing.  

This conference is in Hong Kong. I will be speaking remotely on the evening of December 4 Boston time, morning of December 5 in Hong Kong.

Also, I will be delivering (in person!) the annual Thoralf Skolem memorial lecture at the University of Oslo on the afternoon of December 8. Skolem was an influential mathematician and logician; several of my early papers were inspired by his work on reduction classes for the predicate calculus, through which I became a friend and collaborator of the combinatorial genius Stål Aanderaa (known to computer scientists mainly as one parent of the Aanderaa-Karp-Rosenberg conjecture). Among the delights of this honor is the opportunity to once again see my old friend, with whom I did some of the most challenging work of my career.

The subject of my Skolem lecture will be “The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic,” based on my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of thirty-two of Leibniz’s writings on binary (about to be published by MIT Press).

Both of these talks will be aimed at non-specialists and should be of broad interest. I hope that the Skolem lecture will be livecast, but have not gotten confirmation about that yet.

PS. Let me take this opportunity to flag what Don Knuth had to say after reading Leibniz on Binary (this arrived too late to appear on the back cover):

“This book is a model of how the history of computer science and mathematics should be written. Leibniz pointed out the importance of putting ourselves into the place of others, and here we get to put ourselves into the shoes of Leibniz himself, as we're treated to dozens of his private notes, carefully translated into idiomatic English and thoroughly explained.”
—Don Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming, Stanford University

An early Harvard report on women's athletics

 Harvard took over responsibility for women's athletics in 1974. Until then, such teams as existed were administered by Radcliffe College, then a legally independent entity. This transition was one of several steps that eventually (but not rapidly) led to the end of the asymmetric status of women students at Harvard.

In connection with the ongoing commemoration of Title IX (which was enacted into law at about the same time, but was not then seen as having much to do with women's athletic opportunities), I found this Position Statement on Nomenclature for Men's and Women's Teams at Harvard, written in 1983. While limited in scope, it is a masterpiece of logic and precision, and I post it here for the historical record since it does not seem to be readily available elsewhere. I had seen it years ago, but hadn't even remembered it until I was at a basketball game a few years ago in which the Harvard women's team was playing the TCU "Lady Horned Frogs"--the sort of diminutive this report outlawed at Harvard.

Among the notable things about the report is the professional distinction of the Faculty members who came up with it, and the lack of any political disproportion among those achieving consensus on what were even then politically fraught issues. It would be hard at Harvard today to assemble a committee that politically balanced--if you also expected that its members would come up with anything of significance.

Preregistration is the Enemy of Liberal Education, and Other Crimson Op-Eds

The Harvard Crimson yesterday published my op-ed on preregistration (AKA the end of "shopping period"), a matter expected to be voted by the Faculty on May 3. (On this matter, see also the excellent letters in Harvard Magazine by Howard Georgi and an impressive list of alumni, not that I expect such sentiments to have much traction with the faculty or the current administration.) I have long been puzzled that the humanities faculty seem favorably disposed toward preregistration, which will mark the end of any hope they have of attracting new students into their fields. As the College becomes more consumer-oriented and the socioeconomic profile of the student body shifts, however gradually, toward the inclusion of more disadvantaged students, it will become more, not less, important for the humanities to make their case to the incoming 18-year-olds about their fields, because, given the state of secondary education in America, those students will not arrive at Harvard thinking the humanities are anything but an exotic luxury for the well-to-do.

Here is the op-ed.

Preregistration is the Enemy of Liberal Education (April 20, 2022)

Now while I was at it, I thought I would pull together everything I have written for the Crimson over the years. I think this is the full list but I may be missing something; do let me know if you spot an omission. In some cases the Crimson itself doesn't have an active version, and I have resorted either to the Internet Archive or to my own records.

Athletes Can Change Their Minds, Too (Letter to the Editor, February 27, 2020)

Lewis Letter to Khurana (about single-gender social organizations; January 31, 2017)

No Values Tests (with Eric Nelson, Margo Seltzer, and Richard Thomas; September 13, 2016)

Mandela and Harvard (December 11, 2013)

Remembering Peter Gomes (May 26, 2011)

Copyright Harvard 2008 (June 4, 2008)

We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Truth (Letter to the Editor, September 30, 2008)

Stumbling Blocks (November 8, 2007)

What Happened? (June 7, 2007)

Talking About Elections, Identifiers Must be Qualified (Letter to the Editor, April 20, 2007)

College Sends Grads Off with Exhortation to “Serve Society” (Letter to the Editor, October 27, 2006)

Memorial Hall Transept Should Honor the Dead (Letter to the Editor, October 13, 2006)

Lessons for the Future (June 7, 2006)

Amateurism On and Off the Field (April 21, 2006)

Donors, Not Harvard, Should Give to Relief Efforts (Letter to the Editor, October 24, 2005)

In Memory of Archie Epps (September 12, 2003)

Shopping for an Education (June 5, 2003)

Harvard in a Beer-Ad World (November 4, 2002)

Harvard in America, a Year Later (September 11, 2002)

Things to Think About (September 14, 2001)

The Racial Theory of Grade Inflation (April 23, 2001)

Raise the Council Fee (November 29, 1999)

Romance and Love at Harvard (February 19, 1999)

Tales from the Chad Box (Fifteen Minutes; February 12, 1999)

College’s Actions Justified in Reporting Elster’s Arrest (Letter to the Editor; February 19, 1998)

Clarifying the College’s Policy on Alcohol (Letter to the Editor; October 24, 1997)

Letter to the Editor (alcohol policy; February 21, 1996)

Logical Process for PBHA (with Theda Skocpol; December 6, 1995)

Harvard College moves toward a planned educational economy

 A recent meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was devoted largely to undergraduate education. That is a rarity, and an uninformed reader, hearing that, might hope that the tragic crisis in Europe had resulted in some introspection on the larger purpose of higher education in a democracy, along the lines that motivated the educational classic, General Education in a Free Society (aka Harvard’s 1945 “Red Book”). After all, for better or worse, Harvard educates many leaders of state, much of the judiciary, and many titans of industry. Harvard has a role in determining whether future leaders can grapple with the conflicting values underpinning the survival of civilization.

 

Alas, none of that came up in the March 1 meeting. Instead, the educational items on the agenda included (I was not there and am relying on the writeup in Harvard Magazine):

1)    Should Harvard allow double concentrations?

2)    Should students be allowed to take more than a couple of professional school courses toward their undergraduate degrees?

3)    Should students be required to choose what courses they plan to take well in advance of the beginning of the term?

The affirmative answers to these questions seem to have been presented mainly as bureaucratic adjustments. References to educational objectives in the proposals seem to be outnumbered by references to orderliness and efficiency. Most telling is that neither the president, nor the dean of the Faculty, nor the dean of the College seems to have framed these issues at all or to have contributed to the discussion. Speaking on behalf of the proposals were members of the committees making them and a subdean four levels down from the top.  That follows a historical trend: The Red Book was the brainchild of President Conant, the Core Curriculum of FAS Dean Rosovsky, the Gen Ed II review was entrusted to the dean of the College, and so on. Undergraduate education gets pushed lower in the Harvard org chart every time it is considered.

 

I have blogged about preregistration before, and not much to counter my concerns seems to have come up in the meeting. I would pose but one question prompted by a passage from the Magazine’s reportage. (This is a rhetorical question because as a retired faculty member, I am no longer entitled to ask such a question in a Faculty meeting.)

If everything worked as the committee proposed, Nickel said, “All of us will benefit,” with undergraduates gaining confidence that they could actually take the courses they chose and course heads planning better so they can “make pedagogical choices that work.” 

Which does that mean?

(a) faculty will respond to unexpected enrollment surges, now known far in advance, by increasing their teaching staff, or

(b) course caps and lotteries will have been routinized and executed so far in advance that students will have time to “choose” alternatives in an orderly way, when they are denied entry to the courses they actually want to take?

I suspect the latter, because no one seems to have suggested the former.

 

When I chose the title of this post, I was trying to see what all these incremental changes have to do with each other. The common thread is that education should be a well-planned, purposive activity. Students should decide, among the wares offered by the faculty for reasons of their own, which ones they wish to acquire. If those are professional training courses, no problem. Faculty should know, well in advance, how much of their own teaching they wish to offer to students, and not be personally bothered by student demand exceeding their supply; let some algorithm sort it out before classes start. Students who want to fit the jig-saw pieces of Harvard’s course offerings together in a way that maximizes the number of decorations on their diplomas should be rewarded for doing so, even if it limits their opportunities for educational speculation and serendipity. What Harvard is offering is an expensive product, and our main objective should be to make sure students can take away the maximum value, within the limits of faculty willingness to accommodate excess demand.

 

I am amazed that the humanities faculty have not resisted this drift more vocally. Ironically, it seems to be the computer science faculty who spoke most loudly against pre-planning, which will hurt the humanities the most and probably only benefit the STEM fields.

 

In any case, we are surely a long way from the days when the Harvard faculty thought it was their job to preserve the idea of human freedom and to educate students who would not let civilization perish. For all of our institutional commitment to social justice, isn’t it time to remind ourselves of those even deeper and larger purposes, on which we can act with tools no other institution has to the same degree at its disposal, the full-time, four-year attention of much of the nation’s future leadership?

In memory of Fred Abernathy

My colleague and friend Fred Abernathy passed away a few days ago, at the age of 91. A fine obituary is here. Fred was my mentor and collaborator in several of my loving criticisms of Harvard; one of them I detailed on this blog; see also Harvard Magazine's account. And it was Fred who, in his innocent, shambling way, asked President Summers why Harvard was so vigorously defending its actions in the Harvard-in-Russia scandal. The Faculty room's collective gasp at the president's in artful response (to use Alan Dershowitz's characterization) was the beginning of the end of the Summers presidency. But there was more to Fred than all that; he invariably kind to students of every variety, and was Harvard's energy watchdog before that was fashionable.

Like many others, I will miss him. I spoke at his Zoom memorial service; my tribute is posted below. I tried to write something Fred would enjoy.

Uncle Fred.

I am not sure who first referred to Fred that way. It might have been Mike McElroy. Or it might have been me, or someone else. But as I tried to take stock of what we have lost with Fred’s passing, it’s the phrase that keeps pushing to the front of my mind.

Fred was, to be sure, an avuncular figure. Kind and funny, with a big laugh, never hiding behind a locked door, warm and genial. So comfortable in his own skin that his frustrations and disappointments, and he had some, always came out with humor rather than anger. He could go on the offensive, but the attacks were never launched as a fist against a chin. They were rather as a pinprick against a balloon. No one who was in the Faculty Room on February 7, 2006, will ever forget Fred’s dry observation about Harvard settling some litigation with the federal government, to the tune of $31 million dollars, over a faculty shell game. “It appears to me,” Fred said, “Harvard was defending the indefensible.” Poof!

But to me, and, I expect, to many others, Fred was close to being a real uncle and not just an admirably avuncular figure. What are uncles for? Uncles (and aunts too) are the people to whom you turn when you are in despair about your relation to your parents. Your uncle understands your parents, and can be honest with you about them because he isn’t compromised by your relation to them. 

And the parent, for these purposes, is Harvard, of course. And its sundry deans and transient presidents, who come and go while the faculty remain anchored in place. Fred knew Harvard and its weaknesses and foibles. Not to complicate the metaphor, but he was Harvard’s son too.

When I joined the faculty, DEAP, as it was then known, was a small place. And yet I felt isolated within it. There was little family feel among the skeletal group of computer scientists. Some were intensely rivalrous; some were just nuts; more than one were sleeping with their graduate students. It was the senior mechanical engineers who showed me how practitioners of a mature science behave. They let me tag along to their lunches at the old Legal Seafoods in Inman Square. It was Fred and Annamaria who made me and Marlyn welcome in their home. It was at Fred’s office, stacked to the ceiling with books and journals, where the door was always open for me to wander in, toy with stuff, and chat. It was Fred who made me feel, to use today’s lingo, included and belonging, and taught me how to transfer that feeling to others. Fred taught me not just how to be a professor, but how to be a good member of the Harvard family.

I was always amazed at how much Fred knew about the inside-baseball of Harvard, and how his prescience in the energy field made him an especially valuable loving critic of the institution. I remember Fred pointing out the absurdity that even as late as 2005, Harvard built a brand new building, 60 Oxford Street, which in midwinter was pumping into the frigid outside air the heat it had extracted at great cost from electronic equipment, at the same time as it was burning fossil fuels to heat the building’s offices, badly. A metaphor for Harvard’s centralized dysfunction, as though heating and cooling were different departments, each jealously defending its turf against interference by the other, lest both be put out of business.

Ah, Fred, we will miss you. You were so good to us and so good for Harvard.