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In Boulder I saw a great deal of Gamow until his death in 1968. His health had been failing for a few years, his liver had weakened under the assaults of a lifetime of carefree drinking. He was quite aware of this and said to me on some occasion: "Finally my liver is presenting me with the bill." This did not prevent him from working and writing till the very end. At his Russian funeral, when he lay in an open casket, I realized that he was only the second dead man I had ever seen in my life. Though I was not conscious of the shock this gave me, I had to hold onto the rail when we stood up for the chants so that my knees would not buckle under me.

Gamow's autobiography, My World Line, was published posthumously from fragments of his unfinished manuscript.

By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder. They had become friends even though Condon often felt that neither he nor his collaborator Gurney had received their due share of credit for the discovery.

Condon was a marvelous person. For me he typified the best in the native American character, earthy, super-honest, solid, simple, and at the same time very perspicacious. His political views often coincided with mine. He did not like Nixon, who had hounded him on the Un-American Activities Committee to the point that he resigned from the directorship of the Bureau of Standards. He joined the physics department in Boulder after developing heart trouble; the year before his death in 1973, he had been given an artificial heart valve, which rendered his last months more active and comfortable.

In the relative greater freedom of university life, longer vacations, no fixed schedule except for some teaching, I was returning to a more academic type of science in a milieu of mathematicians and physicists. The mathematics department was acquiring excellent researchers in the foundations of mathematics, set theory, logic, and number theory. Wolfgang Schmidt, an Austrian by birth, was one of them, powerful and original in the latter. Another is a younger, brilliant Pole, Jan Mycielski, a student of Steinhaus, whom I invited to accept a professorship when I was chairman of the department. We have since collaborated in problems of game theory, combinatorics, set theory and — during the last several years — on mathematical schemata connected with the study of the nervous system. Mycielski, with Rota and a Los Alamos mathematician, William Beyer, gathered and edited the first volume of my collected works, which has been published by the MIT Press under the title Sets, Numbers, Universes. The Boulder mathematics department also has a number of young people strong in analysis and topology.

In 1967 the mathematician Mark Kac and I were invited by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to write a long article which was to be part of a series of special appendices to a new edition of the Britannica. Since then it has appeared separately under the title Mathematics and Logic. It received very favorable reviews and has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, and Japanese. It was rather difficult for us to find the right level of presentation. Designed not so much for the broad public but rather for scientists in other fields, we tried to make it a semi-popular presentation of modern ideas and perspectives of the great concepts of mathematics.

As the reader may have noticed, much of my work seems to have been done in collaboration with others (just as this book was assembled in collaboration with Françoise). One of the reasons for this is my leaning on conversation as a stimulant to thinking; the other is my well-known impatience with detail and a certain distaste for reading what I have written. When I see one of my papers in print, I have a childish complex, a tiny nagging doubt that it might be wrong or that it may not contain anything interesting, and I discard it after a quick glance.

Mark Kac had also studied in Lwów, but since he was several years younger than I (and I had left when only twenty-six myself), I knew him then only slightly. He told me that as a young student he had been present at my doctorate ceremony and had been impressed by it. He added that these first impressions usually stay, and that he still considers me "a very senior and advanced person," even though the ratio of our ages is now very close to one. He came to America two or three years after I did. I remembered him in Poland as very slim and slight, but here he became rather rotund. I asked him, a couple of years after his arrival, how it had happened. With his characteristic good humor he replied: "Prosperity!" His ready wit and almost constant joviality make him extremely congenial.

After the war he visited Los Alamos, and we developed our scientific collaboration and friendship. After a number of years as a professor at Cornell he became a professor of mathematics at The Rockefeller Institute in New York (now The Rockefeller University.) He and the physicist George Uhlenbeck have established mathematics and physics groups at this Institute, where biological studies were the principal and almost exclusive subject before.

Mark is one of the very few mathematicians who possess a tremendous sense of what the real applications of pure mathematics are and can be; in this respect he is comparable to von Neumann. He was one of Steinhaus's best students. As an undergraduate he collaborated with him on applications of Fourier series and transform techniques to probability theory. They published several joint papers on the ideas of "independent functions." Along with Antoni Zygmund he is a great exponent and true master in this field. His work in the United States is prolific. It includes interesting results on probability methods in number theory. In a way, Kac, with his superior common sense, as a mathematician is comparable to Weisskopf and Gamow as physicists in their ability to select topics of scientific research which lie at the heart of the matter and are at the same time of conceptual simplicity. In addition — and this is perhaps related — they have the ability to present to a wider scientific audience the most recent and modern results and techniques in an understandable and often very exciting manner. Kac is a wonderful lecturer, clear, intelligent, full of sense and avoidance of trivia.

Among the mathematicians of my generation who influenced me the most in my youth were Mazur and Borsuk. Mazur I have described earlier. As for Borsuk, he represented for me the essence of geometrical intuition and truly meaningful topology. I gleaned from him, without being able to practice it myself, the workings of n-dimensional imagination. Today Borsuk is continuing his creative work in Warsaw. His recent theory of the "shape" in topology shows increasing power and applications. His general interests and mathematical outlook are very close to mine, and our old friendship was renewed after the war during his visits to the United States and my brief trip to Poland in 1973 when I saw him in his country house near Warsaw.

One could go on ad infinitum recollecting from memory, reflecting and writing down. If the reader is still with me, he may have derived from the preceding a sort of existentialist (the word is in vogue) picture of my life, these times, and the many scientists I have known. By way of a conclusion to this chapter I will add a self-portrait which I sent to Françoise before we were married. I am translating from the French which accounts in part for its awkwardness.