OBITUARY – HEINI HALBERSTAM, 9/11/1926 – 1/25/2014
Heini Halberstam, beloved husband of Doreen Halberstam, father of Naomi, Judith, Lucy, Michael, Jean and John, grandfather of eight, died peacefully in his sleep on January 25, 2014 after a short illness in Champaign, IL. He was 87.
Halberstam, a mathematician known for his work with prime numbers, was born in 1926 and was the only child of Rabbi Michael and Judita Halberstamova. He spent his early years in Most, a small town on the Northwestern edge of Bohemia, in a region then known as the Sudetenland. Michael Halberstam moved to the area from Vienna in the 1920’s to become the town’s Rabbi. When Heini Halberstam was 10 years old, his father died suddenly from a heart attack and he and his mother moved soon after to Prague.
As anti-Semitism crept across the region, Judita made plans for her son to leave for safety and, in April 1939, she put him on one of the Kindertransport trains leaving Prague for London. Halberstam arrived a week later in England at age 12 and he never saw his mother again. In 1942, Judita Halberstamova, along with most of Prague’s Jewish community, was deported by the Nazi’s during the round up of Jews from Prague as retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich in 1942. Judita Halberstamova died in a Nazi work camp of typhus within the year.
Halberstam was able to thrive in England and went on to university with the assistance of his beloved patron/foster parent, Anne Welsford. Halberstam was billeted with Welsford for the duration of the war and benefitted from her ambitions for him. She encouraged him to go to university and he read mathematics at the University of London, obtaining his PhD in mathematics in 1952 under the mentorship of Theodor Estermann. A long and successful career followed with appointments at Trinity College Dublin from 1962-64; the University of Nottingham from 1964-1980; and finally, he took a position as head of the department, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1980, and became an emeritus professor there in 1996.
Halberstam’s first marriage was to Heather Peacock, a teacher and opera singer. When Heather died tragically in a car accident in 1971, Halberstam was left with four children. He married shortly after to Doreen Bramley and the couple enjoyed a long and happy marriage of 42 years.
Halberstam was an analytic number theorist whose work took up one of the most mysterious areas of mathematics – the distribution of primes. As one of his peers, E. Bombieri, said of prime numbers: “To me, that the distribution of prime numbers can be so accurately represented in a harmonic analysis is absolutely amazing and incredibly beautiful. It tells of an arcane music and a secret harmony composed by the prime numbers.” Many mathematicians use the language of mysticism to speak of primes – they are both seemingly unpredictable and oddly regular; they represent a pattern and natural order of some kind, but that pattern and its order feels unreadable and just beyond the reach of the human mind; primes are unique and eccentric but also part of a flow of numbers that has been variously described as “mysterious,” (G. H. Hardy), “cosmic” (M. Jutila), “glamorous,” (R. Bellman), “beautiful,” “lawless and devilish” (George Spencer-Brown). This “arcane music” and “secret harmony” occupied Halberstam throughout his career and he published a book with Hans-Egon Richert on Sieve Methods that remains a major book in the field.
Heini Halberstam was a complicated mix of great intellect, high expectations and ambition, impatience, generosity, love and passion. As a teacher, he did not seek to win popularity competitions but instead demanded a high level of performance and commitment from his students. As a consequence he was admired and respected by many students and colleagues over the course of his long career and he leaves an impressive intellectual legacy behind.
After his retirement, Halberstam, for the first time, returned to Prague with his wife Doreen to follow the trail of his mother’s deportation. He was moved and surprised when he found her name inscribed upon the wall of the Holocaust memorial at the Pinkas Synagogue dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia. He went on to research the history of the Kindertransport, his means of escape from Prague, and he spoke occasionally at high schools and in his own synagogue about his experiences of those times.
Heini Halberstam left behind a short memoir for his children and grandchildren to read when he died and he prefaces it with a provocative quotation from Nabokov’s “The Eye”: “A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a ‘thus’ and an ‘otherwise’, with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating… against the dark background of the past.” Clearly, Heini relished this mysterious structure of life in much the same way that he embraced the mysteries of prime numbers; he was aware of the ways in which chance, coincidence and random events shaped the contours of a lived life with as much force as will and intention.
At the end of his memoir, Heini offers: “I hope I have not dwelt unduly on my career; I wanted to convey that, with no talent whatever and only modest ability at my disposal, I did just about as well as my mother could have wished; and I hope that such success as I’ve had has been some service to you all. I’ve had a life split into incompatible segments, and no doubt this has left its mark on me.” Those incompatible segments – a tranquil childhood interrupted by global war; an adulthood marked by loss, love and success; and a decline at the end characterized by vulnerability, love and sadness – make up a unique life, a life divisible only by itself and one. Heini Halberstam, secular to the end, leaves us his survivors with this one piece of wisdom: that life, itself is full of surprise and horror, mystery and patterns, regularity and randomness and our task is not to solve these mysteries but to live in reverence along side them. Heini Halberstam, rest in peace.
Thank you so much for writing such a beautiful rememberance of Heini. And especially for including some thoughts from his memior. Those last few sentences will be ones I will remember especially during difficult times.
– Amit
Thank you Amit. Sad to lose Heini but he was at peace. Jude x
This is beautiful, J — I’m so glad to have read it, and think also that it gives a glimpse of the exquisiteness of your loss and so am sad with and for you. xoKandice
Thank you Kandice! Hope to see you somewhere soon. Xx
A remarkable life, strikingly, beautifully told. I’m so sorry for your loss, but grateful to learn about him and the lessons he imparted. Thinking of you.
Eric
Beautifully and moving, Jack. I of course want to express my condolences, but I can’t resist saying that this is yet another form of writing you’ve mastered and more. I hope, though, that you don’t have too many occasions to write in this genre in the near future.
Thank you for writing this.
I didn’t know Heini well, but I did meet him on one of his brief visits to Nottingham in the 90s.
On hearing my name, the conversation went as follows.
Heini: “Does your mother write books?”
Joel: “Yes she does.”
Heini: “In that case, I went to school with your father!”
(I believe that they both went to the same school in the East End of London.)
Dear Jack,
The obituary of your dear Dad captured his life and spirit as we knew it. It is a loving tribute.
Nancy Diamond, Urbana
This is very beautiful and though I never met the man it is a stark reminder of the wonder of each life. sending you lots of love. laura
Jack: Thank you for sharing this. Your father’s reflections upon mystery, chance, and possibility are full of rich lessons. I hope that your memories of him, along with his memoir, provide some comfort to you and your family in this time of loss. Hugs.
Dear Jack,
What an amazing life your dad led, and what an inspiring legacy he left. My sincerest condolences to you and your family.
Jody Vallejo
Jack,
This is so beautiful. Thank you for writing and sharing such a beautiful, felt, and rich tribute. I can sense the source of your father’s resilience and touch upon you. Please take care, L
Dear Jack,
Thank you for a moving obituary about Heini. I encourage you to publish this obituary in the News-Gazette or maybe some other newspaper. Among other things, that will make it possible to cite various facts about Heini’s life from this obituary in the Wikipedia article about him.
Although I joined the UIUC Math Department several years after Heini’s retirement, I have met him quite a few times and I have great respect for him as a mathematician and as a person. His remarkable life story needs to be told and remembered.
Ilya Kapovich,
Champaign, Illinois
So beautiful, Jack. Such a lovely tribute to your dad in all his complexity. How lucky that you have his own words in the form of his memoir to draw on. He bequeathed you such a rich, if difficult, history. Much love, GG
Dear Jack, Thank you for sharing this amazing life and these experiences with us–the figure in these patterns, the mysteries, the being alongside them . . . You have my condolences, Susan
Jack, I did not know until just now. Grief. Love Brett
Sad news, but a comfort to hear his passing was a peaceful one. He certainly did an excellent job here in Nottingham.
What a lovely tribute to the Heini we knew, loved and will miss.
love to you all.
I always sat in the front of his class. I loved the smell the pipe he smoked when he would come walking into the classroom. This man taught me as a young freshman at Illinois in 1987. He was the best! He taught me well. I often tell people who would listen about this Professor. Very few teachers are able to make an impression on a student so much that they remember them for the rest of their years. HE WAS THAT MAN! I have moved on but my heart is still pure Illini. He will be missed but I am sure he is in a better place.
Heini was the ultimate “Mensch”, as well as a towering intellect. The memory of the uplifting moments we had conversing with Heini, including his incomparable ability as a wordsmith, will live in our hearts foreover. With love, Astrid and Earl.
Heini had an amazing career,and lived life to the full.
Will be sadly missed always in our thoughts.
Dear Jack:
I just learned of your father’s death today. I am so sorry for your loss and very moved by your deeply felt tribute to Heini’s life and work as a mathematician and father and son. He lived a long and intensely important life–one experienced at the most profound interstices of history, ideas and feelings.
May his name be praised.
My warmest sympathy to you and yours.
5-4-2014
I am saddened to hear of Heini,s passing. My sincere condolences. Heini taught me as an undergraduate and later was Head of Department when I completed a PhD at Nottingham. I was not one of his students but he nevertheless showed great interest in my progress. I will always remember his very lucid seminars on Sieve Methods-lucid only in the sense that he made complex problems seem manageable. Rest in peace Heini.
I just recently heard of your father’s death. Thanks for the wonderful obituary. As a student and colleague I have fond memories of his “great intellect, high expectations and ambition, impatience, generosity …”, especially his generosity.
That’s such a beautiful tribute. My heart goes out to you and yours.
Dear Jack,
having been inited to Nottingham from Germany, your father invited us to live in your lovely house, while you were in the States as children. How generous! Only later I met your father a couple of times in various contries, where my father Prof. Dr. Eduard Wirsing and your father met to create, discuss and enjoy endless maths and build up a friendship over continents, religions and language barriers.
Your father was such a nice person. I am so sad to hear he died.
Angela
Hi Jack
I had no idea of your father’s passing. Please accept my condolences. I have some childhood memories of him but I was very little, but my father (Donald Peacock – Heather’s brother) always spoke fondly of him. My mother reminded me that Heini was one of the Winton’s kids.
All the best.
Steve
Mr. Halberstam,
I feel as if I was intruding as I read this page. You invited the reader into the life of your family. For most, this remains a private affair – the idea of family and the personal relationships it forms. I am touched and honored to know that you offer your own experiences and an intimate knowledge of you to the public. To me, this conveys humility. I was introduced to two of your youtube videos by a professor in Sociology 222 – Family and Marriage. I can not explain how your theories have assisted me to show ideas of acceptance to a family in turmoil, friends that were not opening their hearts in a way they needed to. You opened doors that felt nailed and screwed shut. Your father’s wisdom does not fall far from the tree, as you have held onto his legacy and been another wise man in an age where they are in short supply. Thank you humbly.