Medusa

I remember Jerry coming out to Dad's summer camp, Homestead, back in the early 70's. He and Maggie would come visit, and sometimes Jerry would lecture. I had generally disliked the morning lectures, because I felt that was time taken away from a summer day that should be spent swimming, doing some craftsy activity at a workshop, or just watching grass and flowers grow. Jerry's lectures changed all that.

I will never forget that crisp summer morning decades ago. Jerry stood under those tall pines bordering Moose Pond, and drew magical parallels between Medusa and octopus from the sea. Sitting next to a sparkling boulder covered in mica and lichen, Jerry opened my eyes to everlasting truths behnd stories that are so often casually dismissed as "myths."

For example, Medusa was famous for her head of hair that was made of living snakes. The octopus has such a feature attached to it. Medusa lived a life of hermitage, as do octopi. They blend and disappear into their surroundings, appearing only long enough to catch prey or move to another hiding place. Medusa did not seek the company of others, people came to her. This is the way of the octopus as well. It camouflages itself into its surroundings, and food swims, crawls, or lands in the octopus's hiding spot. Medusa was known for turning those who gazed upon her into stone. The octopus stuns its visitors, renders them immobile, and devours them. When threatened, the octopus disappears in a cloud of ink, like a legendary assassin.

When Jerry's lecture was over, I knew that Medusa had not been slain. It was an ugly rumor in mythical form. I knew Medusa was alive and well - living a life of self chosen, blissful solitude, in the salty depths of the sea.

Every time Jerry came out to visit, I would toss whatever plans I might have had for that day. Instead, I would go do something REALLY exciting . I would plant myself among his loyal listeners and immerse myself in the magic, the brilliance, the gentleness, and the light that always seemed to radiate from his words, his smile, and his wisdom.

When I grow up, I want to be like that.

-- Cori (Ertha) Fukuchi

Contrasts

I used to see Jerry and Maggie on campus together in the 1970s, with his large belly and her extreme fitness making such a contrast. For some reason my father-in-law knew Jerry, undoubtedly through academic connections over the years. They were both brilliant across many subjects and in love with arguing, but my father-in-law was not a mensch, as Jerry has been widely described.

Before reading the Boston Globe obituary, I didn't realize that pianist Theodore Lettvin was Jerry's brother. Theodore was at Cleveland Institute of Music when I was growing up, and I certainly knew the name. Maybe I heard him perform in Cleveland, or maybe I knew classmates who had studied with him.

-- Debbie Levey

Placing out

I'll never forget my first exposure to Jerry. It was orientation week in 1984, and a number of us were in the Concourse lounge debating whether to place out of first semester calculus and physics. Some people had taken AP classes in high school and had scored high enough on the AP exams to take credit for first semester classes. Jerry, and other Concourse advisors, insisted that we not place out of these classes because nearly EVERYTHING we were going to learn at M.I.T. had foundations in these subjects. It was imperative that we have solid understanding of calculus and physics. 

Jerry pointed out that there were two possibilities. The first was we already knew everything in these subjects and these classes would be easy for us. "Lord knows," he said. "You could stand to have some easy classes your first year at M.I.T." The second was that we DIDN'T know everything, and it would therefore be a very good thing that we took the classes to get that solid foundation.

One girl was not to be dissuaded. She was adamant about skipping the classes.

"Why do you want to place out of them?" Jerry asked.

"Because then maybe I could get started on my other classes and then graduate early and save my parents some money," the girl replied.

Jerry leaned back in his chair with a contemplative expression on his face. "Think of your parents," he responded as he took a long drag on his cigarette. "As a natural resource, to be used to the fullest extent possible."

I elected not to place out of those subjects.

--Joel Simansky

Cats and Dogs

When we lived in Harvard Square, we had a beautiful and highly snobbish cat called Carruthers: aplomp was his middle name. He would coil himself around Jerry’s neck while he, Maggie, Sally and I strolled to a coffee shop in the Square. Carruthers would sit on a chair like ‘a real people’ and drink cream from a saucer. OK, he wasn’t an octopus, but he would only do his shoulder-draping act for Jerry.

On one of our weekend sojourns at their Vermont pad, their dog chomped on a porcupine in the middle of the night, impaling itself with numerous spikes which penetrated both his upper and his lower jaws. To say that said dog was not altogether happy stretches even a Brit’s gift for understatement. Luckily, a more or less local vet told us to bring him over, but to restrain him from his own frenzied and futile attempts at spike removal…. So off we went in the Model A Ford, Jerry driving on seemingly endless dirt roads in almost total darkness while I was in the backseat trying to keep that poor dog from self-destruction. By the time we arrived at the large and sadistic individual who claimed to be a vet, the dog and I were both close to extinction.

After the brutally extraction of the spikes, the sedated animal and I again cuddled up in the back of the car for the journey home. And so endeth another vacation night in beautiful Vermont.

Ed Mlavsky

An illuminating lesson

My story about one of his lasting insights came from a class with a lecture hall in which he passed around a clipboard with a pencil tied to a string. We all had to sign in for attendance documentation. 

Sometime near the end of the lecture, Jerry turned off the room lights and turned on the UV lights and everyone learned an indelible and 'glowing' lesson in contamination and ease of transmission of materials -- infectious or chemical -- because we each 'lit up' in everywhere we had touched, scratched, etc.! because the pencil had been coated with fluorescein dye!! 

This one 'trick' was such a great way to demonstrate this point.. never to be forgotten.

Jerry Abraham, MD (MIT '66)

The Chair

Maggie asked me to tell this story.

When Jerry was retired (you know that he would not have done so voluntarily) his retirement package and as a token of the institute's esteem and in honor of his many contributions, a black lacquer chair bearing the MIT emblem.

At about the same time, a janitor that he knew, who had worked at Tech for most of his life, also retired. He got his retirement package and as a token of the institute's esteem and in honor of his many contributions ... ummm ... nothing.

The chair Jerry sat in every day, leaning over his pad with a pen or sitting back with the ubiquitous cigarette fuming in his fingers ... that chair ... that was the one that MIT gave Maggie.

Jerry's chair was in the Janitor's living room.

The F & T Deli

I am delighted that Marvin Fox got in touch. As one of the proprietors of the F & T Deli, his food fueled many of Jerry's theories. He writes:

"Jerry Lettvin was a wonderful man! He was a customer in my restaurant, the F & T Deli. In fact, there is a memorial plaque in Kendall Square about the restaurant. One of the paragraphs is: 

"Over the decades, the restaurant's counter and tables were filled with truck drivers, hardhats, MIT faculty and students, and tradespeople of all kinds. The conversation ranged from the Red Sox to the race tracks, from problems at construction sites, to how frogs see, to the origins of the universe." 

Jerry told me that the conclusion of this study "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" was formulated in my deli. He also wrote a dirge about Fox & Tishman. 

DIRGE
There's no pub
in the Hub -
only singles bars
and bistros run by hockey stars.


There's no fare
in the Square -
only Harvbard Yard
and clip-joints that take a credit card.


What they sell
at Lobdell
is recycled sludge
prepared to nourish, at best, a grudge.

Sky and school and spirit are gray -
Where can we eat in a civilized way?


Fox and Tishman, Tishman and Fox,
dealt us compassion with bagels and lox,
meatloaf with morals, lentils with leers -
they warped our palates as we bent their ears.
Execs and secs, jocks and crocks
lunched at leisure at Tishman and Fox


Now this bastion
has cashed in
The sagging ceiling, the flaked chrome
that gave us home
are no more to be.


Because
Fox and Tishman
Fox and Tishman
Fox and Tishman


have been F'd by the "T."

(The F&T was closed to make room for an MBTA station.)

My favorite story has to do with his appearance on David Susskind's Show about popular college professors. Susskind was upset with Jerry because, unlike the other members of the panel, he was not wearing a jacket and tie (remember things were very different in those days).

He made this known and asked if this type of informal attire set a tone for his students. Your father replied that he was a fat man and he felt comfortable in an open short sleeve shirt. He then said that he did not care how his students dressed when they came to class; if they brought their girlfriends or boyfriends; or their sandwiches. 

He said, "I am only interested in their enjoying my class and getting something out of it."
The next week, when your he and mother came into the diner, I told him, to his surprise, that I had seen him on TV. I further said that I liked his reply except, when he said sandwiches, why didn't he say the sandwiches they got at the F & T? 

He laughed and said, "Marvin, if I had thought of it, I would have said that."

From Herb Lin

I just heard about Jerry's passing, and I grieve. As I recall, I took a humanities course from him, but my fondest memories of Jerry are outside of that class. As a graduate student, I had an office in Building 20, and I visited him a couple of times in his lab (in the 1970s). Jerry was the one who taught me how to forge signatures and also used to shout "Yellow Peril!!" every time he saw me (I'm Chinese.) I also recall that he taught a class how to hack Servend machines when the owner of the vending machines refused to believe that he had defeated their security mechanisms.

To square two promises made regarding student admissions to Concourse - one that early applicants would get priority over later ones and the other that students admitted to Concourse would be elected randomly -- he came up with the concept of a weighted lottery. Early applicants got two tickets, later ones got one. I've used that concept as the solution for all kinds of problems since I heard about that.

And yet -- I don't think he ever knew my name. Actually, it didn't matter - he was always willing to talk to me, he always said interesting things, and I always learned things from him whenever I spoke to him.

Even though I had not seen him for many years, I will miss his spirit. We are poorer for his passing, but celebrate the riches he gave us all.

From Humberto Maturana

Humberto was one of Jerry's colleagues on WTFETTFB (What the frogs eye tells the frog's brain) and a very dear friend. This photo was taken when he was working with Jerry.

He writes from Chile.

"I met Jerry when I was writting my Ph.D thesis at Harvard  May 1958. He came to the Biological Laboratories to give a seminar on the frog's (Rana pipiens) visual brain. I liked him and showed him my work. He liked it and he invited me to come to do a Post Doctoral work with him at MIT.

I mentioned his invitation to the the people of the Biological Laboratories and they said that I should not accept because he was very intelligent but very erratic. He would begin something but would not finish it. I wondered.  Yet I liked him, I liked his manner of thinking, his passion, his humanness, ... and I accepted his offer and went to work with him after my graduation. It was the best thing that I did for the rest of my life.

We became great friends. He accepted that I could have a small laboratory of my own in the sixth floor of a biology buildng where I worked alone in the mornings, to go to work together in the afternoon in his laboratory in the depatment of Electric Engeneering. At 1pm he would come to my little laboratory and invite me saying: "Come Humberto, who do you think that would be most annoyed with our discoveries of yesterday so that we go to tell them, to them?" So I would accompany him, a small fellow besides a big man discovering the wonderful things that they had done together.

Although there is much more to say this is all for the momment.
Jerry Lettvin was a great person, I admired him, learned from him and loved him. He was old in the right moment to die with dignity."

Humberto can be found at the website for his school "Matriztica."

From David Fish

Jerry Lettvin was legendary among the undergrads at MIT. Many of us heard of his powerful intellect, his capacity for scholarly invention and penetrating inquiry even before we knew what he did or his field of research. It was only much later, when I became involved as a graduate student with neurophysiology, that I began to understand when reading his work what he had accomplished.

Before that, however, I had a close encounter of the Lettvin kind in my senior year as an electrical engineering student. At MIT an undergraduate thesis project was required, and Jerry Lettvin sat on the review committee for my group of undergrads presenting early progress reports on our thesis work. I had done a reasonable amount of work and made enough progress to acquit myself acceptably when giving my first progress report. Not surprisingly at the first of any such sessions there were always those who were perhaps a little—or more than a little—behind in their work on their theses. Now I will have to say that the great Prof. Lettvin could hardly get himself bent out of shape just because some puny undergrad had come forward with a puny work product, but I was to learn that day what he might heap upon a bullshitter.

There was among my group of supplicants, a particular type of undergrad commonly seen in my day (then 1971)--the happy hippie slacker who might hide, under a dirty flannel shirt and long tangled locks (mine were not tangled) a stunning mind and piercing wit (one of my roommates comes to mind, who would ace his final exams in 20 minutes after an entire term of smoking weed and not knowing where the lecture hall for the class was—but that’s another story) but there was of course no way to tell by looking. Jerry Lettvin and his kind at the ‘tute probably had seen these and many other things come and go in their years of educating young people in their volatile years.

At one point, came time for one such young classmate of mine, let’s call him “Tom” to give his report. Of course, Tom had no papers, binders, books, folios—not so much as a pencil—with him, yet attempted to engage the committee—and Jerry Lettvin—on the cool ideas he had at least taken the trouble to conceive in the preceding 20 minutes or so. Evidently thinking of himself as some sort of musical savant or conniving to bamboozle these uncultured eggheads with his audacious intellectual range he then bumbled forward with some notion of examining Mozart’s music for some arcane structural patterns. Now this was an electrical engineering thesis group, mind you, but no idea born of any serious examination was ever dismissed out of hand—such was the ethos of MIT. It didn’t take long for Tom to tour the group through his crude idea during which Jerry Lettvin listened impassively. Lord knows what he was thinking, though.

Then he started asking Tom questions. It became immediately apparent that Tom hardly knew the tiniest fraction of what Jerry Lettvin knew … about Mozart, his music, the influence of his parents, the age he lived in, and on and on. With every answering non sequitur that followed from Toms lips, Jerry Lettvin’s speech became more pressured and animated, yet he never used an accusatory word or called Tom out for his disrespect or lack of diligence. Instead, he spun out yarns and more yarns of interesting ideas that Tom could explore for his thesis project.

I have always remembered this witnessing of the wellspring of Jerry Lettvin’s knowledge and his energy for its exploration, and his overpowering Tom, not with abuse or pronouncement, but with the riches of example. It hasn’t abided in perfect constancy, but on the occasions of my work as an educator, I’ve often reminded myself of what I have been given by the likes of Jerry Lettvin.

David Fish
MIT 1972 1977

An even more fictional Jerry

Abe Igelfeld sent his condolences and included an interesting document.

"Rummaging through old papers before moving offices," he says, "I chanced upon the following fragment, hand-written on the back of a computer print-out."

The document, titled "An E20 Fragment" features a thinly disguised Jerry.

It's a little too long for a blog post, so I'm posting a link to it.

Let me know if you have trouble with the link, I think I've given sufficient permission but I've been wrong before. (About five minutes ago, actually.)

Jerry as a "fictional" character

I have not been able to track down the book, although at one time I owned a copy, nor do I remember the author (what a useless post this is), but there was a science fiction novel called "The Seed" in which Jerry played himself.

The premise was that some folks were building a super-computer in order to figure out why Earth exists. Somewhere around the middle they cite Jerry by name.

It was not a durable piece of fiction so I'll just go ahead and spoil it by telling you that mankind, according to the computer, is merely an infection that will develop nuclear weapons that produce a beautiful surface prior to the bead being drilled and strung on a huge necklace. Thus the title.

It was a bit derivative of an old John Collier short story, but I was thrilled to see Jerry's name in a novel.

If anyone remembers the particulars of the book, send me a note and I'll fill in the blanks.

Jerry’s Easy Creativity:

Jerry’s genius was so all-encompassing and informal, I bet that most of us are unaware of many of his accomplishments. The following anecdote might be of interest, as it shows his little-known role in getting Jack Eccles the Nobel Prize.

In the race between Eccles and Cole to be the first to succeed in recording intracellularly from neurons, there was a significant technical barrier. Glass micropipettes had the potential to make such recordings, but stray capacitance limited the size and quality of the intracellular signals. At a conference in Cold Spring Harbour (in the early 1950s I think) the problem of stray capacitance was discussed. Jerry said that it could easily be solved by incorporating some “negative capacitance” into the amplifier circuit. He then proceeded to draw on the blackboard a rough circuit that produced some negative capacitance.

The New Zealand physicist, Jack Coombs, was present when Jerry drew the negative capacitance circuit and it was he who told me this story. Jack took the details in his head back to New Zealand where he was Eccles’ right hand man in the project to record inside motoneurons. It took some ingenuity for Jack to substantiate Jerry’s ideas into the thermionic valves of the day, but he succeeded, and the rest is history. The first successful intracellular recording from spinal motoneurons followed and Eccles received the Nobel Prize for that achievement.

Like Jerry’s innovative studies of octopus retina that were never published, along with many others, the story of negative capacitance is mostly unsung, but I think is typical of his easy creativity.

Jack Pettigrew
Taringa
27 April 2011

Jerry and computers

One of Jerry's quirks was a deeply ingrained revulsion towards the use of computers. It was a wonderfully illogical prejudice. He used many complex electronic devices in his research, and hundreds of gadgets with embedded microchips without any qualms, but to use a "computer" was, to him, anathema.

It could be quite frustrating. We all knew that using a computer would have made it possible for him to read and communicate more easily. He would not budge.

When faced with an open laptop, he would go into a little bit of theater, playing a saint being confronted by the devil. This was a role that he relished, but, since many of his children and grandchildren were involved in high tech, tended to limit conversations.

He loved gadgets. I remember him being delighted with my MP3 player at one Thanksgiving dinner, right up to the point where I explained that I loaded the files on from my computer. I remember thinking at the time that it was like the aborigines in Gamow's "One, Two, Three, Infinity" who went blank when trying to deal with more numbers than they had fingers.

It was an act, of course, sort of a practical joke that got out of hand and became a programmatic response but he got used to enjoying the frustration that it created in those around him.

But that was Jerry for you. There was nothing more amusing to him than taking an indefensible position and making it impregnable.

From Alex Andrew

I learned a lot from Jerry during a spell in MIT in the mid nineteen-fifties, both in the laboratory and in generally knocking around with him and others, especially Brad Howland. I got the sad news of Jerry’s death in a phone call from Brad.

During part of the time at MIT I lived in the Lettvin household and knew David, Ruth and Jonathan as youngsters. I would have liked to tell a story or two to illustrate that crazy but productive time but many incidents come to mind and I haven’t been able to choose. I’ll put some of them into an obituary notice for the journal Kybernetes. In the meantime I send condolences to all, especially Maggie.

Improbable Research

Marc Abrahams posted a nice article about Jerry on the Improbable Research blog.

The Stazione

Jerry spent several years at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy.

The ground floor of the building, to the left of the central door was a public aquarium, the rest of the building consisted of labs, offices, libraries, and other support facilities for marine biology research. Some of the other people in residence were: J.Z. Young, Andrew Packard, Ilona Richter, Martin Wells, Ilona and Beate Schiff, etc.

One of Jerry's favorites among the maintenance staff was the electrician who tested the 220v light sockets by licking his fingers and inserting them.

Lock picker

Jerry had one of the most massive key-rings I have ever seen. My memory may be faulty, but I remember it as being a full six inches in diameter with little room left for additional keys, a real "janitor's ring." He had keys to dozens of offices, labs, classrooms, basements, roofs, athletic facilities, etc. It was too big for his pocket, so he usually wore it on an industrial strength metal key retriever that was clipped to the leather belt at his waist, where it jangled and scraped against walls and doors. At times I wondered how he kept his pants from falling down since the net weight must have been a couple of pounds.

But, although he carried this huge metal rosary at his waist, he seldom used any of them since his favorite mode of moving about the MIT campus was through the use of a "loid" He always had a couple of old credit cards, a length of plastic ruler, or a piece of twisted coat-hanger in his pocket, and there were few places that could deny his entry. He prided himself on being able to use the maze of tunnels, corridors and maintenance passages to cross the entire campus without ever going outside. He tried to teach me the tricks, but I was an indifferent student of the art, either being too clumsy or having too big a self-righteous stick up my butt.

Bearing in mind his usual attitude of never letting truth stand in the way of a good story, Jerry once claimed to have taught Amar Bose the tricks of gaining after-hours entry at the MIT swimming pool so that he could experiment with its acoustics.