Dr. Yuan's Speech at the Memorial Service for Dr. Ky Fan

Mrs. Fan, Relatives and Friends of Dr. Fan, Ladies and Gentlemen:

When I was preparing this speech, many occasions that Dr. Ky Fan and I got along and many words that he said to me suddenly came to my mind.

I was a graduate student in the Math Department, UCSB from 1982 – 86. Dr. Charles Akemann was my thesis adviser. However Dr. Ky Fan was in my Ph.D. committee. The last course Dr. Fan taught at UCSB was the Topological Groups given in 1985, right before he retired. This was also a course that he most favorite and he chose as his last course to teach in his life time.

I consider myself to be very lucky that I was one of the students in this class. That was a one-year sequential course, three quarters, met three times a week. This course was so well-organized, so unique different from any existing books. He was an extremely strict professor, his homework and exam problems were very hard, but gave us grades very fairly.

Today, Ladies and Gentlemen I would like to share with everyone in this room several stories of Professor Ky Fan.

1) A story In 1984, Dr. Fan taught Complex Analysis to senior math-majored students.

In that year, Purdue Prof. Louis de Branges proved the long-standing Bieberbach conjecture, the conjecture became Branges' theorem.

Surprisingly, one day Dr. Fan said to me that he would talk about Bieberbach conjecture in his class. I was so curious how he could make the undergraduate students understand it and I went to his classroom to listen to his lecture. That was the last session of the course, Dr. Fan Spent 5 minutes to talk about the final exam, 5 minutes for questions, then spent 40 minutes lecturing the Bieberbach conjecture, talked about its background, its significance as well as outlined the proofs. Of course that was not the original proof of de Branges, but the simplified one with the help of Russian mathematicians. Dr. Fan made the undergraduate students understand de Branges’ work, brought the students to the latest development in Complex Analysis.

2) A story in 1989

Having left China for 50 years, Dr. Ky Fan returned to his motherland in June, 1989. He was very exiting from the first day he stepped on his motherland. I invited him to Tsinghua University where I taught. He met the vice president who was an old friend of him and the chair of math department who was a classmate of him at PKU 50 years ago.

Dr. Fan received honorary professorship from Peking University, his Alma Mater.

He delivered 4 lectures in different areas of his research in Beijing.

I attended his lectures with great joy, not only because of the mathematical flavor in his lectures, but also because that was my first time to listen to his lectures given in Chinese, his mother tongue.

3) A story in 1996

Think about mathematics every waking moment

Dr. Fan once served as the graduate adviser in the math department, UCSB. He was very serious with his job. He called meetings of all graduate students in the conference room of the department, in the first day of every quarter those years. In the meetings, he always said the following to the graduate students: “Now you are professional mathematicians, you have to think about mathematics every waking moment!” His words became a well-known proverb, a symbol of Dr. Fan among graduate students. The students ordered t-shirts and his words “Every Waking Moment” printed on the T-shirts.

It was not just a pet phrase, but was a reflection of his life. His whole life was dedicated to mathematics. I would like to share with you the following story.

In 1996, when I taught at Santa Clara University, Dr. Fan and his wife came up to Northern California to visit his relatives and me. They spent almost one day with my family. In our living room, we chat and he said about two things that I cannot forget.

One of them is the following: He said to me: You have to teach me how to use computer and the internet so that I will not have to go to the UCSB library to check recent publications. I probably can do it at home.

The fact is that both Dr. Fan and his first wife had knee problems. They had difficulty to walk and they had to sit on the wheel chairs all day long at home.

Then he talked about von Neumann. “In Princeton, most of us did not understand why von Neumann spent so much time inventing computers and algorithms. Now I think he was right. If he just concentrated on pure mathematics, at most he could only influence the mathematicians. But now his work has influenced the whole world, and the entire human!”

Another one I cannot forget is that he showed me a theorem he just proved a couple of weeks ago before he came to Northern California. It was a theorem of group representation for a type of topological group. He wrote down the theorem on a piece of paper on the tea table, very clearly. Notice that he was 82 at time.

I am so grateful and appreciate for all the mathematics he taught me, all the guidance how to research he instructed me and all the help that he extended to me.

Dr. Fan was one of the greatest mathematicians of our time. His extraordinary life on this earth has come to an end. The extraordinary good that he did lives on.

Finally, I have few more words to say to Dr. Fan. But I must say them in Chinese and in the way it used to be as before he was alive.

樊先生：您虽然已经永远地离开了我们，但我觉得您并未走远，因为您教我数学，您给我讲那些数学家故事，都好似前几天的事。特别是，您的数学还将继续影响一代又一代的数学家们。我觉得您为数学而生，一生都在追求数学之美，辛苦一辈子，如今您该完全地休息了。