The Tardy Times
margo's kinfolk
WHEN NEXT she visits San Francisco, Rebekka Struik will find on her 
daughter's dining table a rediscovered, newly framed photo of youthful beauty.
The smiling face is that of Rebekka herself, then a young woman who would earn a doctorate in mathematics and give birth to Marion, Margo and Lulu. But it wasn't easy.
Women then and now were generally unwelcome in the male-dominated world of higher mathematics. Her Czechoslovian mother, Saly Ruth Rambler, who won her Ph.D in 1918 with a dissertation on "the axiomatics of affine geometry," was believed to be the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics in the 500-year history of the University of Prague. She never won a university position in Europe or America despite her achievements and the prominence of Rebekka's father. Dirk Jan Struik, Ph.D, who married Saly in 1923, was a Dutchman who became in 1928 a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a highly acclaimed historian of science and a lifelong Marxist. His "Concise History of Mathematics" (1948) is still in print, but he was also fascinated by New England's pioneering thinkers and inventors ("Yankee Science in the Making," 1962).
Rebekka would be the last person to blow her own horn, even to her family. Here's what we found from Google:
After growing up in Belmont, Mass., and graduating from Swarthmore College, Rebekka was beginning her postgraduate career when the Red Scare of the 1950s caused her to leave the University of Illinois and lose a promised internship at Northwestern University. She finaly earned her own Ph.D at New York University in 1955 (her dissertation, which had nothing to do with sociology, was entitled "On Associative Products of Groups"). Her marriage to Hans Freistadt and the births of her daughters took her from New Jersey to Vancouver, B.C., and finally to Colorado, where she began the teaching and research that would eventually, after many frustrations, win her a faculty position at the University of Colorado.
In the meantime, while trying to rear her daughters and distracted by divorce from Hans, she published numerous papers on Group Theory in journals from London to Canada to the U.S. (The titles have meaning only within the math world. Examples: "On Verbal Products of Groups," "On Nilpotent Products of Cyclic Groups," "Engel Congruences in Groups of Prime-Power Exponent," "Partial Converses of LaGrange's Theorem" and a 1982 commentary, "Some Non-Abelian 2-Groups with Abelian Automorphism Groups.")
Her difficulties in getting tenure and eventual promotion as a full professor were reflected in a paper, "Women Mathematicians," that she presented at a conference in Portland on "Gender Issues in Math and Science." Her interest in the history of mathematics, a legacy from her father, took her to the 1997 meeting of the American Mathematical Society with a paper entitled, "Pascal and the Problem of the Points." Two years later, she retired from the university
and, when asked about her activities, she told a university publication that she has been active in the League of Women Voters, Boulder Bicycle Commuters and "community knitting." Also: "I've been going on hikes and trying to learn wildflower identification."
Her mother died in 1993 at the age of 99. "When asked what he missed most when he turned 100," wrote one of his admirers, ""Professor Struik said simply, 'My wife.' " He died in 2000, aged 106, 46 years after he retired from MIT.
Rebekka (at left) lives in Boulder but often visits her grandchildren – Kenny Ludlow, daughter of Margo Freistadt in San Francisco, and Shafir Wittenberg, son of Marion Freistadt in New Orleans.
She continues her lifelong activism on issues of social justice and progressive politics. Her 80th birthday will be celebrated in the fall. She's still beautiful.
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WHEN SHE changed her name legally to “LooEase Fries'dat,” we adopted instead her stage name, Lulu, from her hip-hop CD, “Voodoolulu.” To Joseph Illige, her boyfriend, she's simply Lou. (Luckily, she never heard of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and Robert Service's anti-heroine, the Lady Known as Lou.) After their visit to San Francisco in January, Joe and Lou drove north to take a long look at Portland. They are thinking seriously about saying goodbye to Manhattan, where she has been an actor, rap singer and video editor. Joe has spent most of his life in New York City. Oregon would mean farewell to her rent-controlled apartment in Hell's Kitchen, now renamed Clinton. But it could also mean hello to an affordable home of their own. Despite Portland's renowned boredom, the metropolis once known as Stumptown (aka “City of Roses”) is far indeed from what Gibbons called (thank you, John Bartlett) “crowds without company.” As of July, however, doubts began to emerge. Joe has a contract to work until next spring and is working on a novel, and Lulu is still trying to edit news videos while raising funds for her documentary on people who don’t vote (see Film Notes). New York, New York.
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ALSO VISITING FRISCO last winter: Margo's elder sister, Marion, and her precocious 8-year-old son, Shafir, who is enrolled at New Orleans Jewish Day School. Her life has changed greatly since Katrina forced them to flee New Orleans in 2005. Its power failures thawed the polio viruses that she studied and caused other biohazard catastrophes that closed the downtown LSU Medical Sciences Center. It put an end to her scientific investigations and, as it turned out, her 13-year tenured professorship at Louisiana State University.
Readers of the last Tardy Times will recall her difficult times that year. Since then she has taught at Tulane University, Our Lady of Holy Cross College and Xavier University. She is now teaching at a junior c0ollege, Delgado. In the meantime she enrolled in an MBA program at the University of New Orleans.
“Logically, in this country we have thousands of talented, skilled, dedicated researchers who want nothing more than to do basic research to solve problems,” she wrote. “Moreover, we have an NIH budget in the hundreds of billions. Yet, the majority of these researchers are unable to function optimally. They either spend most of their time fighting for money, or have given up fighting for money. The result is waste of money, material and human effort, with the net result that less scientific problems are solved. This is not a resource issue. It is a management issue.”
Marion, who now has an MBA to go with her Ph.D, said, “I have a lot of ideas now.”
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IN ADDITION to their frequent trips to medical meetings and conferences, Hans and Sherry Freistadt traveled in December to Vienna to celebrate the 80th birthday of his sister, Lisa Lange. Then they stopped in London to see his cousin, Berta Freistadt, who after her mastectomy was back in Kilburn (see Notes from Margo and the Margo and Berta page). In October, they were off to another meeting in Montreal. Hans continues with what he calls “his slow, limited practice in medical gynecology and primary care mostly for fun and for the love of it, with little financial revenue.” Sherry may quit nursing to start her own business, but for now she works days in “chart review” . . . Her mother, Margie Cole, who was moved to the Shadowbrook Health Center in Oroville, died in August at age XX .
The stage manager, Delisa emerged from behind the scenery to take a leading role in “Killer Joe.” (See Stage Notes.) And with Betty, she bought a little house on one of the nice, shady streets of Chico.
As his sister settled down in Chico, her brother Benny Freistadt left for the big city. After an eventful summer in 2007, he spent one last semester at Chico State. It’s pilloried, perhaps unfairly, for partying. In the spring he transferred to SF State, known instead for sobersided students.
Benny has tentative plans to become a pharmacist. Margo converted part of her garage/shop into a guest room for her younger brother. He spent the summer working in Oroville but now is back for another stint at SF State.
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GWEN AND ROGER BRAY, Margo’s aunt and uncle in New Zealand, published their 35-year scientific survey, “Fish Populations in a Tidal Estuary in Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, from 1971-2004.” That doesn't mean they quit the fish census from the inlet at their bach (getaway cottage) at the hamlet of TeMako on the South Island near their home in Nelson. The study, they reported with regret, “is recording new records of minimum weights and lengths.” A year ago, they helped publish “Story of Friends of Nelson Haven and Tasman Bay,” an account of the oldest coastal conservation organization in New Zealand.
Returning to Kiwiland last year was their athletic daughter, Melissa, who bought a house in Wellington and settled in with her brand new baby, Theo. After leaving Lausanne, Switzerland, she continues to work online, writing stories for the International Rowing Federation.
Lynn Ludlow and Margo Freistadt
daughter's dining table a rediscovered, newly framed photo of youthful beauty. The smiling face is that of Rebekka herself, then a young woman who would earn a doctorate in mathematics and give birth to Marion, Margo and Lulu. But it wasn't easy.
Women then and now were generally unwelcome in the male-dominated world of higher mathematics. Her Czechoslovian mother, Saly Ruth Rambler, who won her Ph.D in 1918 with a dissertation on "the axiomatics of affine geometry," was believed to be the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics in the 500-year history of the University of Prague. She never won a university position in Europe or America despite her achievements and the prominence of Rebekka's father. Dirk Jan Struik, Ph.D, who married Saly in 1923, was a Dutchman who became in 1928 a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a highly acclaimed historian of science and a lifelong Marxist. His "Concise History of Mathematics" (1948) is still in print, but he was also fascinated by New England's pioneering thinkers and inventors ("Yankee Science in the Making," 1962).
Rebekka would be the last person to blow her own horn, even to her family. Here's what we found from Google:
After growing up in Belmont, Mass., and graduating from Swarthmore College, Rebekka was beginning her postgraduate career when the Red Scare of the 1950s caused her to leave the University of Illinois and lose a promised internship at Northwestern University. She finaly earned her own Ph.D at New York University in 1955 (her dissertation, which had nothing to do with sociology, was entitled "On Associative Products of Groups"). Her marriage to Hans Freistadt and the births of her daughters took her from New Jersey to Vancouver, B.C., and finally to Colorado, where she began the teaching and research that would eventually, after many frustrations, win her a faculty position at the University of Colorado.
In the meantime, while trying to rear her daughters and distracted by divorce from Hans, she published numerous papers on Group Theory in journals from London to Canada to the U.S. (The titles have meaning only within the math world. Examples: "On Verbal Products of Groups," "On Nilpotent Products of Cyclic Groups," "Engel Congruences in Groups of Prime-Power Exponent," "Partial Converses of LaGrange's Theorem" and a 1982 commentary, "Some Non-Abelian 2-Groups with Abelian Automorphism Groups.")
Her difficulties in getting tenure and eventual promotion as a full professor were reflected in a paper, "Women Mathematicians," that she presented at a conference in Portland on "Gender Issues in Math and Science." Her interest in the history of mathematics, a legacy from her father, took her to the 1997 meeting of the American Mathematical Society with a paper entitled, "Pascal and the Problem of the Points." Two years later, she retired from the university
and, when asked about her activities, she told a university publication that she has been active in the League of Women Voters, Boulder Bicycle Commuters and "community knitting." Also: "I've been going on hikes and trying to learn wildflower identification." Her mother died in 1993 at the age of 99. "When asked what he missed most when he turned 100," wrote one of his admirers, ""Professor Struik said simply, 'My wife.' " He died in 2000, aged 106, 46 years after he retired from MIT.
Rebekka (at left) lives in Boulder but often visits her grandchildren – Kenny Ludlow, daughter of Margo Freistadt in San Francisco, and Shafir Wittenberg, son of Marion Freistadt in New Orleans.
She continues her lifelong activism on issues of social justice and progressive politics. Her 80th birthday will be celebrated in the fall. She's still beautiful.
><
WHEN SHE changed her name legally to “LooEase Fries'dat,” we adopted instead her stage name, Lulu, from her hip-hop CD, “Voodoolulu.” To Joseph Illige, her boyfriend, she's simply Lou. (Luckily, she never heard of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and Robert Service's anti-heroine, the Lady Known as Lou.) After their visit to San Francisco in January, Joe and Lou drove north to take a long look at Portland. They are thinking seriously about saying goodbye to Manhattan, where she has been an actor, rap singer and video editor. Joe has spent most of his life in New York City. Oregon would mean farewell to her rent-controlled apartment in Hell's Kitchen, now renamed Clinton. But it could also mean hello to an affordable home of their own. Despite Portland's renowned boredom, the metropolis once known as Stumptown (aka “City of Roses”) is far indeed from what Gibbons called (thank you, John Bartlett) “crowds without company.” As of July, however, doubts began to emerge. Joe has a contract to work until next spring and is working on a novel, and Lulu is still trying to edit news videos while raising funds for her documentary on people who don’t vote (see Film Notes). New York, New York.
><
ALSO VISITING FRISCO last winter: Margo's elder sister, Marion, and her precocious 8-year-old son, Shafir, who is enrolled at New Orleans Jewish Day School. Her life has changed greatly since Katrina forced them to flee New Orleans in 2005. Its power failures thawed the polio viruses that she studied and caused other biohazard catastrophes that closed the downtown LSU Medical Sciences Center. It put an end to her scientific investigations and, as it turned out, her 13-year tenured professorship at Louisiana State University.
Readers of the last Tardy Times will recall her difficult times that year. Since then she has taught at Tulane University, Our Lady of Holy Cross College and Xavier University. She is now teaching at a junior c0ollege, Delgado. In the meantime she enrolled in an MBA program at the University of New Orleans.
“Logically, in this country we have thousands of talented, skilled, dedicated researchers who want nothing more than to do basic research to solve problems,” she wrote. “Moreover, we have an NIH budget in the hundreds of billions. Yet, the majority of these researchers are unable to function optimally. They either spend most of their time fighting for money, or have given up fighting for money. The result is waste of money, material and human effort, with the net result that less scientific problems are solved. This is not a resource issue. It is a management issue.”
Marion, who now has an MBA to go with her Ph.D, said, “I have a lot of ideas now.”
><
IN ADDITION to their frequent trips to medical meetings and conferences, Hans and Sherry Freistadt traveled in December to Vienna to celebrate the 80th birthday of his sister, Lisa Lange. Then they stopped in London to see his cousin, Berta Freistadt, who after her mastectomy was back in Kilburn (see Notes from Margo and the Margo and Berta page). In October, they were off to another meeting in Montreal. Hans continues with what he calls “his slow, limited practice in medical gynecology and primary care mostly for fun and for the love of it, with little financial revenue.” Sherry may quit nursing to start her own business, but for now she works days in “chart review” . . . Her mother, Margie Cole, who was moved to the Shadowbrook Health Center in Oroville, died in August at age XX .
><
DELISA FREISTADT and her friend Betty Burns followed her father and our pal J.P. Uhlrich as visitors to Berta in London. Returning to Chico, she still gets up every day before the crack of dawn as the baker at the Café Flo. When her Blue Room Theatre was captured in what described as a “politico-financial coup,” she joined most of the angry volunteers in organizing a rival dramatic group, the Rogue Theatre Collective. The stage manager, Delisa emerged from behind the scenery to take a leading role in “Killer Joe.” (See Stage Notes.) And with Betty, she bought a little house on one of the nice, shady streets of Chico.
As his sister settled down in Chico, her brother Benny Freistadt left for the big city. After an eventful summer in 2007, he spent one last semester at Chico State. It’s pilloried, perhaps unfairly, for partying. In the spring he transferred to SF State, known instead for sobersided students.
Benny has tentative plans to become a pharmacist. Margo converted part of her garage/shop into a guest room for her younger brother. He spent the summer working in Oroville but now is back for another stint at SF State.
><
GWEN AND ROGER BRAY, Margo’s aunt and uncle in New Zealand, published their 35-year scientific survey, “Fish Populations in a Tidal Estuary in Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, from 1971-2004.” That doesn't mean they quit the fish census from the inlet at their bach (getaway cottage) at the hamlet of TeMako on the South Island near their home in Nelson. The study, they reported with regret, “is recording new records of minimum weights and lengths.” A year ago, they helped publish “Story of Friends of Nelson Haven and Tasman Bay,” an account of the oldest coastal conservation organization in New Zealand.
Returning to Kiwiland last year was their athletic daughter, Melissa, who bought a house in Wellington and settled in with her brand new baby, Theo. After leaving Lausanne, Switzerland, she continues to work online, writing stories for the International Rowing Federation.
Lynn Ludlow and Margo Freistadt
The Tardy Times
tardytimes.com
September 2008
tardytimes.com
September 2008
