Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Bailey, Duane

Duane W. Bailey, the College's William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy, died unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning of October 27, 1998, in the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. He had entered the hospital because of a painful, though not seemingly mortal, medical emergency, but his long-damaged heart, which had sustained for sixty-two years a life of extraordinary vigor and achievement, could go on no longer.

He was born on September 22, 1936, in Moscow, Idaho. The eldest of four brothers, he seems early to have assumed the role, which persisted throughout his life, of leader and helper to those who came after him. After an active boyhood on his parents' thriving farm in southern Washington, he entered Washington State College (now University) in Pullman, from which institution he was graduated three years later with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, the subject which was dearest to him among his many interests. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Oregon, from which he emerged four years later in 1961 with a doctorate in mathematics. His thesis dealt with the subject of Banach Algebras, in which he maintained a -keen interest throughout his life, notwithstanding the fact that he pursued a great many other mathematical subjects with remarkable energy and versatility. It was at the University of Oregon that he met his lifelong friend James Denton, who was later to join him on our faculty. It was also here that he met his future wife, Leeta, whose constant loyalty and devotion gave him so much help and happiness. He leaves behind him, together with three fine sons, as well as our College community, grateful to him in so many ways for his tireless service and many acts of trustworthy counsel and friendly helpfulness.

After graduate school, Duane assumed a two-year instructorship at Yale. While at Yale, he felt an increasing attraction to liberal arts institutions, and although tempted by an offer from Reed College in his native Northwest, he decided to come to Amherst, where he passed the remainder of his days. His energy and vision must have been early apparent since he was entrusted with the chairmanship of the Mathematics Department even before he had become a tenured member of the Faculty. It was during his early years at the College that he collaborated as an author of an ambitious and successful four-volume series of textbooks in calculus and linear algebra. He also participated in the development of a series of films on calculus for classroom instruction.

Duane's activities as a teacher were remarkably rich and varied. Despite the fact that his graduate training was in a branch of pure mathematics, he ventured as a teacher into an unusually broad variety of subjects, both pure and applied, ranging from real analysis and topology, which are central in the training of professional mathematicians, to numerical analysis and computer science, whose practical utility pervades so much of modern life.

In general, it may be said that he had two ways of teaching, each appropriate to the circumstances. In the more elementary courses, he adopted the time-honored lecture approach, laying a great emphasis on fundamental principles. He had a strong sense of tradition and the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. Often, when asked by students how he knew such and such a thing, he would reply that when he was young he had been shown it by his teacher and that now he was passing it on to them. At the same time, he took pains to show how the thing might have been arrived at through reflection and ingenuity.

In his more advanced courses, however, in particular, those designed for honors students, he employed a very different approach. Mathematicians are familiar with the so-called Moore Method, which derives its name from the distinguished topologist R.L. Moore, who cultivated it with legendary success. In this method, students are provided at the outset of the course with a few pages containing definitions and theorems. The work of the course amounts to this: The students are to ponder the definitions and prove the theorems, relying only upon themselves and the careful guidance of the instructor. No outside help is to be sought. As may be imagined, the work can be agonizingly slow and, in its way, painful. The instructor becomes something like the Socratic obstetrician, presiding over the successful birth of ideas. Very few teachers seem able to conduct such a class with success, and Duane was among them. what is required, aside from mastery of the subject, is steadfast patience, the intuition determining the time to speak and the time to refrain from speaking, and finally, the certain faith that the students will find within themselves the resourcefulness which leads from darkness to light. Duane employed his own version of the Moore Method for many years; not a few of our finest graduates have reported that these courses transformed them from mere learners into mathematicians. Duane's passing leaves us a challenge and a luminous example.

Duane had a complex personality. His actions were not always easy to predict, though his good intentions were never to be doubted. He could and would change his mind, sometimes abruptly, more often in the deliberate manner of one who never stopped growing in intellect. One of his heroes was the celebrated English mathematician G.H. Hardy (after whom he named his last beloved bulldog, still young and missing his master). In G.H. Hardy's view, mathematics was a purely intellectual endeavor, in its highest form devoid, and rightfully so, of all practical utility. He scorned the very idea that any of his mathematical work might one day find utilitarian application. Duane admired this elevated and anti-pragmatic view of his subject, so much so that his increasing involvement in computer science and technology was a source of wonder to some who did not at first perceive the many forces and interests that drove him. For Duane could love the heights of Parnassus and still be a very practical man. He raised bees and made honey and mead, which he would share with friends; he worked in wood; he studied and invested in the stock market; he investigated the laws of probability, partly by means of protracted poker seminars with close College buddies -he was meticulous in keeping score and seemed, on balance, to prefer winning to losing.

Not even Hardy's ghost, then, could keep Duane's practical bent from bursting through into his professional life. Duane had become interested in computers in his earlier years while working during the summers for General Electric. It became apparent to him sooner than to many others that computers would eventually permeate many aspects of American life, including Academia. Whereupon he came to the conclusion that computer science should have a curricular presence at the College. In 1979 he introduced Mathematics 15, the first course in computer science ever offered at Amherst. He taught this and other such courses for many years, even after the time Amherst had computer scientists of its own. Entirely self-taught, he acquired so much knowledge and experience that the College, both institutionally and on an individual basis, turned to him for help and advice, which he unstintingly provided. just as in his beekeeping days, townspeople would often seek him out when menaced by swarms of bees, so in later days would distraught colleagues, made despondent by misbehaving electrons, apply to him urgently for rescue.) In 1984 he became the College's coordinator for computer planning and discharged his duties with energy and distinction. In truth, we may say, paraphrasing Emerson, that computer science at Amherst is the lengthened shadow of Duane Bailey.

Duane served the College in many ways besides those hitherto mentioned. He was never a member of the College Council, for which he more than once expressed his relief, but he did serve with distinction on a good many committees. He was twice elected to the Committee of Six and performed his duties so faithfully that the entire College came to see him as a man to be relied upon for honest and informed advice. He also served in ways less well known. Duane, as we know, was a beekeeper; but more than this, he developed an avid interest in the literature of apiculture and over the years acquired a fine collection of such books, which he dearly prized. Indeed, he was a collector of many things he thought fine, and perhaps it was for this reason that he regularly participated as a judge in the College's annual book collection prize competition. John Lancaster, curator of Special Collections and also a judge in the competition, reports that Duane took especial delight both in the seriousness and in the whimsy and play of the mind exhibited by students in their choice of books.

Duane had a very strong sense of history and took pleasure in instructing himself in the lore of earlier days at Amherst. This is perhaps partly why he took such delight in cultivating the society of faculty members with long institutional memories, with whom he frequently met on convivial occasions. He saw himself very much as part of an age-old tradition. By the same token, he took younger colleagues under his wing, pointing out to them the way they should go, at the same time conveying the grateful impression that it was he who was being instructed by them, as indeed, given Duane's personality, was doubtless the case.

No one could know Duane for long without perceiving that he was a man of strong likes and dislikes. Some could change, but some were constant as the northern star. He liked to raise plants and often did so in his office. He liked to keep bees, but out of doors. He liked bulldogs; cats were another matter unless they had white whiskers. He admired Benjamin Franklin and for years had a portrait of him displayed in his office. He was fond of normal numbers, a taste restricted mostly to the tribe of mathematicians. A lover of music, he was a skilled player of the trombone, an instrument that lends harmony and support but does not crave the limelight. In his later years, he especially admired the music of Shostakovich. His love of restaurants of the most varied kinds is the stuff of legend. He liked red things: red houses, red cars, red peppers. This chromatic predilection did not quite extend to politics, which he followed avidly, and in his last years, he contributed witty and incisive essays to a well-known national political journal. He admired the art of printing, including finely executed financial documents; his contempt, however, for personalized bank checks decorated, as he would say, with "clowns, posies and pussy cats," justifies to some extent, we will admit, his spirited self-description as a "curmudgeon."

Duane was a man of unusual vigor. Of his mental energy, we have already spoken. But he was also endowed with extraordinary physical stamina. Though anything but a sportsman, he loved to be active. He could stay up late into the night working at one of his many projects and still arise early the next morning ready for a full day. His strenuous activity was dealt a sudden blow when, in his early forties, he suffered a serious heart attack. Characteristically, he fought back, learning everything he could about cardiology and cardiologists. After undergoing successful bypass surgery, he was able to recover what in darker moments he feared he had lost forever--the capacity to teach and learn with the vim and enthusiasm of earlier days.

But the blessing of health was to elude him. Some five years ago, after surgery to remove a malignant growth, it was found that he had suffered serious neurological damage in one leg. This left him with permanent pain and restricted mobility. He took comfort in reading the book of Job, but the hoped-for help granted at last to the patriarch never came to him. Indeed, he was beset by other physical difficulties as well, to which a lesser man would sooner have succumbed. Because it was hard for him to remain upon his feet for long, he entered reluctantly on phased retirement. He carried on with his teaching, and despite persistent ill-health, he was able to complete, in collaboration with his son Duane, a professor of computer science at Williams College, a new and timely book on network languages. Indeed, despite increasing sensitivity to pain, he carried on with all his duties to the very end. Though, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, stones might have wounded his feet, to us he was "still cheerful and helpful and firm."

A tree, it is said, is best measured when it is down. Now that Duane's life among us has come to an end and we bid our final farewell here in this room, which meant so much to him because it means so much to the College, we have been able to see and relate (perforce leaving much unsaid) many things about him that were perhaps not apparent to any one person who knew him. There is a poem of Whittier, better known a century ago than now, but known to Duane, named "Telling the Bees." The title refers to an old rural New England custom: whenever a death occurred in the family, the bees were duly informed and their hives decked in respectful mourning. And now we, in our institutional fashion, have honored the custom by telling of one of our own family who has, in Whittier's words, "gone on the journey we all must go. And though sad at his parting, we are consoled by the reflection that despite many troubles he could do so much that brought fulfillment to himself and gratitude to so many.

David L. Armacost, Ralph E. Beals, James Q. Denton, Richard D. Fink, Frank H. Westhoff