Abstract
Doubtless because of Klaus’ influence, I was appointed to a post-doctoral year with the dynamics group in College Park, Maryland for the academic year 1989–1990. At the time the group with the National Science Foundation funding that made this possible comprised Mike Boyle, and Dan Rudolph. College Park had been a centre of activity in dynamics for many years, and there were other faculty members working in the area. Among these were Joe Auslander and Nelson Markley, who worked in abstract topological dynamics, Ken Berg, one of whose early results on measures of maximal entropy had been generalised in the work with Doug and Klaus, Hsin Chu, who had largely worked in the area of topological groups but had done early work on ergodic properties of affine transformations of compact groups, and several others. It was a lively and friendly place, with a large number of visitors and regular weekend workshops in dynamical systems held jointly with Pennsylvania State University. Given the problem that arose during my doctorate of the relationship between completely positive entropy and Bernoullicity, my primary post-doctoral adviser was Dan Rudolph. Nonetheless, the whole group were actively helping and welcoming.
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Notes
- 1.
The poet Archilocus wrote ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, and this distinction was used in a light-hearted essay by Isaiah Berlin [22], who reasonably said ‘Every classification throws light on something’.
- 2.
Freeman Dyson was scheduled to give the AMS Einstein Lecture in October 2008. The event itself had to be cancelled, but the notes were written up and comprise an interesting overview of a broad sweep of Mathematics, particularly as it pertains to Physics [69].
- 3.
Bill Parry passed away in August of 2006, and his remarkable life both as a mathematician and as a person is recorded in a short obituary by his colleague David Epstein and former student Mark Pollicott [99]. A fuller account of his many mathematical contributions appears in a volume of the journal Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems [246]; he was one of the founding editors.
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Ward, T. (2023). College Park, Maryland. In: People, Places, and Mathematics. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39074-6_7
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