안녕

These are some memories of my friend Sungwook Lee, who died two months ago. His funeral was about one month ago, and I originally drafted this then, then put it aside. I’ll try to finish it now.

• Teaching
• Leadership
• Politics
• Catholicism
• Our last conversations
• Ill health

Teaching

Sung had created the Honors Calculus class at USM, then passed it on to me after a few years. In part, he was ready to move on, but he also felt it would help me move toward tenure. I think he also felt I would do a good job because he felt I was very student-focused. In particular, I sometimes took students to a local MAA meeting, where they could participate in competitions and other activities.

I invited Sung to substitute for me in Honors Calculus when I took some students to one such meeting. On my return, I asked the students how it had gone.

“He was funny!” they said, laughing.

“Funny strange or funny ‘ha-ha’?”

“Oh, he told jokes while teaching,” one explained. “Before doing one example, he said, ‘This is so easy, even a monkey could do it.’ But then he got the wrong answer! He looked at us with a grin and said, ‘Sometimes the monkey falls out of the tree.’”

Leadership

After CS Chen stepped down as chair, Joseph Kolibal succeeded him as interim chair. One of his first moves was to appoint Sung as undergraduate program director. That surprised a lot of us, myself included; rightly or wrongly, I had always perceived him and Sung as being at odds with each other.

Not only did they work very well together:, Sung succeeded Joseph, also as interim chair, when Joseph left the university to take a position as permanent chair up north.

At that time, Sung asked me to succeed him as undergraduate program director, a post I held (albeit with changing titles) until I shortly before left the university. Sung was highly supportive of my suggestions and proposals, and often solicited my advice. He cared very much for the students, and as far as I could tell, he cared for the good of the department, and happily approved the use of department funds for travel and recruitment.

Politics

Sung was one of the few academics I’ve known who robustly defended conservative ideas and the Bush presidency. I discovered this a year or two after Obama’s election, when Sung taped a copy of a then-current meme of George W. Bush to his door: As I recall, he was even happier with Trump.

We never talked politics much, but Sung’s public display of a countercultural message — believe you me, that message was very unwelcome in the academy — gives an indication of how he cared more about principles than popularity.

Catholicism

When I first came to USM, Sung was an atheist. When he learned that I am a Catholic, Sung told me that he had been raised Catholic, but they threw him out of Sunday School.

You read that right: the Church threw him out of Sunday School.

Taken aback, I asked him what had happened. He explained that he asked too many questions, so the nuns asked his parents not to bring him back.

Sigh.

Some time later he told me that he had begun to believe in God, “but I believe in an angry God,” he said with a steely smile, “the God of the Old Testament.”

His progress didn’t end there, though; finally he came to believe in the God of the New Testament. His manner of telling me was curious: I was in his office one day for something completely different, and he casually mentioned that he was becoming a Catholic.

He became quite active at St. Thomas Aquinas, the parish that serves the university. He attended and even led cursillos, was active in the Knights of Columbus, and often attended the Sunday Vigil and daily Masses.

Our last conversations

Sung was affable, and his funeral reminded me that he was good at making good friends who valued him, and whom he valued. I’m not so good at making friends, but by the time I left the university we were meeting occasionally for lunch, to discuss mathematics and philosophy — neither of which I’m very good at, by the way.

One topic was a discussion of the nature of mathematics. At the funeral, Khin Maung mentioned Sung’s Platonism, the position that mathematical objects really exist, and that we discover them.

As I understand it, the most famous alternate view is the constructivist position, which argues — again, I’m not very good at this, so I apologize if I misrepresent the position — that mathematics is entirely constructed, and it has no inherent relationship to reality. Its success at describing reality is purely coincidental.

My view is somewhere between those positions: mathematics is a language we create in an attempt to describe reality. The theories we develop approximate real objects, but those objects themselves do not appear in the world.

For example, show me “a two”. The wording here matters: I asked for a noun, not an adjective; it will not do to two show me two apples and say that you have shown me “a two”. And that’s before I point out that the two apples are not in fact equal, in just about any way, not even at the level of DNA, where there is almost certain some minor mutation, so that you have not even shown shown me two apples, but two objects which happen to look alike.

(Von Nuemann’s construction of the counting numbers likewise won’t convince me, inasmuch as I can’t be convinced that {{}, {{}}} is something that anyone honestly believes is “a two” outside the confines of set theory.)

Here’s another way of saying it, inspired a bit by St. Augustine: The language God uses to weave reality into existence is immaterial and quite real. We are material beings who cannot completely grasp and know any idea. We observe phenomena that we wish to describe, and for this we invent a language based in logic to describe them, but at best it succeeds only at approximating the idea. We call this language mathematics.

Such were the conversations we had begun to have at Mario’s Italian Restaurant in 2022.

Ill health

Even before I left USM, ill health had led Sung to take up jogging. You would often see him jogging around campus. He began to look healthier, and he seemed happier.

Shortly after I left the university, he fell ill with cancer, and we had to stop seeing each other for a time.

Eventually I saw him again at Mass, far off to one side and wearing a face mask. I wrote one of my last emails to him after seeing him at Mass: He replied: His condition never improved. I inquired after him at church from time to time, eventually learning that his cancer’s remission had been short-lived, and he had to return to Houston for further treatment. As far as I know, he never returned.

I miss you, Sung. I hope you’ll let me make that pizza for you in heaven.