Fabulous Dave Jagerman: More than an "All American Guy"!

At around 1995, when Internet became widely accessible, fans of famous movie stars, rock groups and novelists all around the world started designing WebPages for their idols. I don't remember if I have ever had an idol that I have looked up to.  However, most recently when I wrote about my Ph.D. co-advisor and my true friend,  Dave Jagerman, in a Turkish mailing list, I realized that I had to design a webpage in his name. After all, as Tayfur (Altiok), who has been my Ph.D. advisor and another good friend, has concisely and rightly summarized, Dave is "a national treasure", and not only to the USA but to all of us. If he were only a genius, perhaps I wouldn't attempt to embark on this project of telling you about this great person. His sincerity, his modesty and maturity have made him a role model in my eyes. That's why I pour half-and-half in my coffee or have dessert after lunch as in the way Dave does, just like a teenager would imitate the rock idol whose poster is hung on his wall. So if there is a person whom I will idolize, and now that it's been more than a year since I left Rutgers, that will be definitely fabulous Dave Jagerman!

          Dave with his famous "All American Guy" hat!       What is story telling though? Is it only about the person around whom the story evolves? Isn't it known that the storyteller also becomes part of the story once he starts telling it? Isn't this truer when it is about us, Dave and me, who have become comrades out of a professional relationship? Then I should present him to you from my perspective, which also concerns my 4 years of stay in the USA.

It was the July of 1999  when I arrived in NJ, honestly not because I had aspirations of becoming a great researcher. I was chasing a real and imaginary love simultaneously. I was there mostly out of jealousy of my friends who had already achieved success in several US schools. I was coming from Turkey, which is to a great extent unknown in the US people's conscious.

I could never admire there much. Although not hard liners, my parents who had to struggle with poverty with their high school teacher salaries were considering the USA, alongside Britain, Germany and France, the new imperialists. It was the Americans who were having butter for breakfast while they were suggesting to us to eat margarines, my father had told me when I was 6, at an age when I thought the rockets fired from Houston were fired by the Turks!

Dave, on the other hand, grew up loving his country. When I was criticizing the war in Afghanistan during a cigar break, he said: "I hear you, Baris. But this country has given me so much! And I love it here!" He was born in the Flower Hospital, Manhattan on August 27, 1923: 63 days before the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. His mom was a first generation American, whose parents had come from Austria. His father was born in Russia.

We can sympathize with them if we remember the famous movie "Fiddler on the Roof", or Anatevka, the village where the events take place, and understand what the Jagerman (meaning Hunterman) family might have endured. Yet, the white Americans were not all welcoming  to the new comers to this land of immigrants expanding at the expense of the Natives. It was first the Irish on the east, then the Asians on the west coast who were considered suspicious. Dave, who never likes talking about politics, would never make comments about his childhood era. However, I, having visited the Jewish Museum on the 5th Avenue NYC, know that especially right after the Great Depression, life wasn't easy for the Jewish Americans, either. It was here at Princeton, for instance, Einstein, whose small busts are now sold in its shops, was not very much liked.

Dave remembers very well Orson Welles' famous radio show. Quoting from Dave: "The Orson Welles radio production seemed real because the show was in progress when there was a bulletin, which announced that aliens had invaded New Jersey.  Most people did not know of its practical impossibility; also it was thought that Mars was the only place that aliens could come from." Upon his success, Orson Welles would go to Hollywood to make one of the best movies ever produced, "Citizen Kane", about a living tycoon of the 1940's, Hearst. Hearst, whose newspapers were widely read by the recently arrived immigrants and working class people who had to move their lips while reading them, would threaten Hollywood.  If "Citizen Kane" were to be released, his papers would bring up the fact that Jews were predominant in Hollywood, which wouldn't be appreciated by the rest of the folks.

Dave, I think, preferred keeping calm. He loved the movies as a kid. He vividly remembers the "Mummy", which filled the rest of the audience with terror. He couldn't excel in Yiddish, the language in which his grandparents spoke to him, but became a learned young man in English attending the famous Stuyvesant High School, who would ask for two contiguous seats for him and his date, to which the person in the box office would say "Excuse me?" And Dave would reword his request: "Two adjacent seats, please!"

Those were the years Roosevelt was the president. He was coming from a wealthy family, but tried to resolve the miseries of the poor by introducing income tax for the rich. The first military coup against an elected American president was being planned behind the doors. Yet, this didn't stop the new constructions going on everywhere: Tunnels were being opened, railways were being extended so that the unemployed Americans could find the means to survive. Ansel Adams, who was recruited to monitor these, was becoming a great photographer taking scenic pictures in the US rural areas.

I saw a  photograph by Adams for the first time at Dave's office at Rutcor, when Ben (Melamed), his office mate who would later on become my friend, interviewed me in August 1999. I was already depressed in this vacant Rutgers campus, which was under deep summer sleep. While looking at Adam's work, I was also thinking that Ben was going to find out that I wasn't perhaps a fit for the Ph.D. program. In fact, his sole compliment would be that I was speaking English very well, which I didn't believe because I was feeling very insecure. There were a couple of more weeks before I were to see Dave. I didn't know that he, inspired by Ansel Adams, is also an accomplished photographer specialized in black and white pictures, who produces them in his own lab. I would learn that Dave also taught others photography in an adult school. He would even take a head-shot for my friend, Mehmet (Kaya), who starred in a play, "Dream'in New York", produced in May 2003. Mehmet, being a poor Ph.D. student like most of us, couldn't afford several hundreds of dollars to have such a picture taken.

The first couple of meetings with Tayfur and Dave were not extraordinary. I was told that Dave had worked at the famous Bell Labs and then become a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology until his retirement. He was at the time closely working on a tough project with Tayfur and Ben, which I would be also involved. I was trying to understand all the jargon that they were using, while at the same time trying to convince myself that it wasn't a mistake to have come to the USA.

When Dave kindly accepted to study with me once a week on Wednesdays, except the winter time when he goes with Adrienne, his wife, to their summer house in Florida, I am not sure if he enjoyed it at first. I was trying to understand his highly technical papers and pointing at certain formulae with my pencil. Being a well organized, neat Virgo, he was getting angry with me: "Let's go and make photocopies for you and do whatever you want with them. I want my original copies untouched!" I was feeling as if I were with my maternal grandfather, who is also very picky and intelligent.

Throughout the years, we have befriended each other dearly. Those who haven't been to the USA wouldn't know this "on the go" culture. You would bump into an American, they would be the ones who would always finalize the conversation with an "I gotta go!" or "I'd better keep going!". Before I came to the States, I had read about this: Unlike us, who would go to a friend's place and chat lazily for hours, the Americans organize their meetings around a social event, be it a movie, jogging or dinner. Time is very valuable. They'd better be heading somewhere, so they will let you go!

Dave is not like that of course. This must have become a cultural trait after the 1950's. He remembers the times when there was not 24x7 hot water in the houses and Americans were not able to take showers everyday. However, what people usually ascribe to the Puritans of New England, i.e., being hardworking is deeply rooted in Dave as well. Since I can easily digress, he let me do this only for a couple of minutes. I could learn from him bits by bits about his past. The longer we worked together, I became more fascinated with him. It wasn't only the difficult problems that he had solved, or the license he had to sail a yacht. His interest in literature amazed me. Here I had finally found someone, who, against the popular stereotyping, is not only good at math but enjoys reading fiction, too. He would open the Bible written in Esperanto, a language he can speak fluently, read the songs (psalms) of David, the King to me. I believe, having witnessed terrible events in the early periods of his life, he thinks that a unifying language such as Esperanto will help us.

One day I brought a beloved book The Garden of Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani to our meeting. There was an epigraph that was provided both in Italian and English and I wanted to test his Italian, which he had learned when he was fighting in Italy during WWII. He was so good at it that the Italians were almost sure that he was one of them no matter how hard he was saying no. "Anyways!" I said to Dave, "read this epigraph in Italian and translate!" And he did! "Nice words," he said, "but they don't mean much if you come to think of it!" I was awed. And he is right! I don't remember what the epigraph was all about!

He continued: "You know Baris, I was married and had children to look after when I decided to do my Ph.D. at NYU! Among many other problems, we also had to take a test in another language to demonstrate our competence. I could read French and German math papers, but I decided to take the Italian test. The only other person who was there was a Catholic priest and you know they weren't used to see mathematicians sitting for such a test. While I was waiting for a technical paper, they asked me to translate the first chapter of Christ stopped at Eboli. Oh boy, it was something but they let me pass!"

Then I started asking him about his Ph.D. studies. And I learned that he could see his advisor, Wilhelm Magnus, only once a month for 10 minutes. The professors of that era would not look in the students' eyes or make any comments. When Dave finally solved the question he was assigned  (The Discriminant of Hill's equation, his Ph.D. dissertation) the highly impressed professor says, "Okay, you got your degree!" But this is Dave in the end! He wants to find the eigenvalues of the same problem. Magnus, who himself has difficulty in obtaining them, objects to this: "Russians are working on it. They will solve it before you will! And then I won't let you have your degree!" Dave accepts the challenge no matter what! However, this doesn't mean that he would have an easy defense. All the old school professors start asking him: "Why are there so few references? Why haven't you considered this and that? Yes, your work is novel but we want to understand if you knew about these and those..."  Dave answers all the questions. At the end of his defense, Magnus who seems to have sweated more, shakes his hand: "You have beaten the Russians!"

How different my Ph.D. path has been when compared to his! Since he believed that old style was wrong, Dave has been always open to me. Even to the degree that when I dyed my hair in blue on the Halloween day of 2001, he found it alright, whereas Tayfur was by himself for a couple of seconds. I have become more research oriented with him. Throughout those four great years, Dave was always polite when he pointed out how I could improve myself. He always indirectly gave the message on why I should read many good and old references, and why I should become competitive in programming. Before my eyes, he became very efficient in the object-oriented Python language when I chose to invest in old good C programming!

Dave never admits that he is a genius. If being a genius implies being crazy, yes, Dave is not a genius. However, he has a bewildering memory. When I ask a question, he immediately refers a book to me, with its full title, author name and even remembers the chapter that I should look into. This is not only because of his genes, I believe. Dave, since his childhood, has chosen to work on problems that he loves. When he was a radio broadcaster, he did it since he loved it. He communicated with people overseas, whom he never met. He studied electrical engineering because he wanted to understand how things were working. Just deriving the formulae was not sufficient for him. That's why he started Cooper Union night school, from where he was drafted into the Army Air Corp three weeks before the final exams and had to postpone his education until the end of WWII.

Since he had to start working at an early age at a shop in Harlem to fix electrical instruments and radios, he became a corporal to specialize in telecommunication at the Fort Monmouth military base in NJ. While in front of his bench in the workshop one day, before he was sent to Morocco, a gentleman accompanied by high ranking officers approached him. He was asked to explain what he was doing. The gentleman then saw a book about electrical circuit theory on Dave's bench and inquired about it. In those days, Heaviside's operational calculus and the Laplace transform were just being associated.  The convolution integral was called Duhamel's integral or also the faltungs integral (quote from Dave). The highly impressed guest said to him to keep up with the good work and left. Dave asked one of the officers who this gentleman was. "Professor Vannevar Bush" was the answer, who was the author of the book on Dave's bench. Perhaps, this conversation is the origin that led Dave to come up with his famous numerical inversion technique of the Laplace transform, which I have been exploiting for my research.

Yet, this wasn't the first time Dave was in Ford Monmouth. Before he was drafted, he was employed at Evans Signal Laboratory here and was living in Belmar with two other friends. One morning when the three of them got on the bus to go to work, an incomprehensible thing happened. A black American lady sat in one of the front seats and the driver told her to go back where she had to stand. The young men stopped her and told her to sit wherever she preferred. The driver became angry and said that he was not going to drive unless she moved back. "If you don't drive" said the three pals, "our friend has a driver license. We will throw you out and drive the bus ourselves!" The driver couldn't say another word and submitted to their order! I was moved with admiration when I heard this story, which took place long before the Black Americans stood up for their rights in one of the most noble struggles for equality in world history.

I am so happy that I was able to introduce my parents to Dave this July 2004 when they came to North America for the first time. My parents, who are Turkish literature teachers, are also impressed with Dave. I told them that Dave had read Dear Shameless Death by Latife Tekin, a Turkish novel translated to English, and Poems by Nazim Hikmet, an internationally acclaimed Turkish poet, two small gifts from me. They thought that the second story was more amazing: In the fall 2002, an actress friend of mine, who is becoming a superstar in Turkey now, took stage in NYC in Ibsen's famous play Peer Gynt. I was telling Dave just before he was about to leave for Florida that I enjoyed his city NYC that weekend since I had seen this play. I was sure that he hadn't heard of it (cause I hadn't known until I saw it!) "Peer Gynt?" He said. "By Ibsen! What a coincidence! I just put the version in Esperanto in my suit case yesterday. I had read it several years ago, and I was planning to reread it!"

Mom Nesrin, Dave and Dad Bedri in front of Ructor

Now that I am in Toronto, in addition to phone calls that we exchange, I am also indirectly in contact with Dave. When I meet with famous researchers, and they speak highly  of their friend Dave and say that they keep on using his results, I feel privileged, too.  Memories are roaring in my mind and I am realizing how much I am missing him. Dave is one of the main reasons why I like the USA no matter how critical I might become about the American foreign or economic policies.

                    Thanks Dave! For being who you are!

 

 

Dave Jagerman Publications:

Books:

Difference equations with applications to queues, Marcel Dekker, 2000, 246 p.

Refereed Papers:

  1. Jagerman, David L.; Balcioglu, Baris; Altiok, Tayfur; Melamed, Benjamin. Mean waiting time approximations in the G/G/1 queue. Queueing Syst. 46 (2004), no. 3-4, 481--506.

  2. Jagerman, David; Altiok, Tayfur. Vessel arrival process and queueing in marine ports handling bulk materials. Queueing Syst. 45 (2003), no. 3, 223--243.

  3. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. Models and approximations for call center design. Methodol. Comput. Appl. Probab. 5 (2003), no. 2, 159--181.

  4. Jagerman, David. Large deviation properties of a correlated arrival process. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 16 (2000), no. 1, 1--25.

  5. D.L. Jagerman, B. Melamed and W.Willinger, Stochastic modeling of traffic processes (invited chapter), in: Frontiers in Queueing: Models and Applications in Science and Engineering, ed. J.H. Dshalalow (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1997) pp. 271–320.

  6. D.L. Jagerman, B. Melamed, Spectral Analysis of Basic TES Processes, ORSA Journal on Computing, Vol. 7, No. 2, 140-148, 1995.

  7. D.L. Jagerman and B. Melamed, Burstiness descriptors of traffic streams: Indices of dispersion and peakedness, in: Proc. of the 28th Annual Conf. on Information Sciences and Systems, Vol. 1, Princeton, NJ, March 1994, pp. 1–5.

  8. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. On Markovian traffic with applications to TES processes. J. Appl. Math. Stochastic Anal. 7 (1994), no. 3, 373--396.

  9. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. The run probabilities of TES processes. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 10 (1994), no. 4, 831--851.

  10. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. The spectral structure of TES processes. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 10 (1994), no. 3, 599--618. 60G10

  11. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. Erratum: "The transition and autocorrelation structure of TES processes. I. General theory" [Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 8 (1992), no. 2, 193--219; Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 9 (1993), no. 2, 311.

  12. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. The transition and autocorrelation structure of TES processes. II. Special cases. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 8 (1992), no. 3, 499--527.

  13. Jagerman, David L.; Melamed, Benjamin. The transition and autocorrelation structure of TES processes. I. General theory. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 8 (1992), no. 2, 193--219.

  14. Jagerman, David L.; Sengupta, Bhaskar. The GI/M/1 processor-sharing queue and its heavy traffic analysis. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 7 (1991), no. 3, 379--395.

  15. Jagerman, D. Analytical and Numerical Solution of Volterra Integral Equations with Applications to Queues, Stochastic Models, 1991.

  16. Jagerman, D., and B., Sengupta. A Functional Equation Arising in a Queue with a Gating Mechanism. Probability in Engineering and Informational Science, March, 1989.

  17. Jagerman, D. Approximations for waiting time in GI/G/1 systems. Queueing Systems Theory Appl. 2 (1987), no. 4, 351--361.

  18. Jagerman D., and B. Doshi. An M/G/1 Queue with Class Dependent Balking (Reneging). Teletraffic Analysis and Computer Performance Evaluation, Noth-Holland Publishers, 1986.

  19. Jagerman, D. Certain Volterra integral equations arising in queueing. Comm. Statist. Stochastic Models 1 (1985), no. 2, 239--256. (Reviewer: S. P. Goyal)

  20. Jagerman, D. L. Laplace transform inequalities with application to queueing. AT&T Tech. J. 64 (1985), no. 7, 1755--1764.

  21. Sengupta, B.; Jagerman, D. L. A conditional response time of the M/M/1 processor-sharing queue. AT&T Tech. J. 64 (1985), no. 2, part 1, 409--421.

  22. Jagerman, D. L. Waiting time convexity in the M/G/1 queue. AT&T Tech. J. 64 (1985), no. 1, part 1, 33--41.

  23. Jagerman, D. Certain Volterra Integral Equations Arising in Queueing, Stochastic Models, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1985.

  24. Jagerman, D. L. Methods in traffic calculations. AT&T Bell Labs. Tech. J. 63 (1984), no. 7, 1283--1310.

  25. Jagerman, D. L. Approximate mean waiting times in transient GI/G/1 queues. Bell System Tech. J. 61 (1982), no. 8, 2003--2022.

  26. Jagerman, D. L. An inversion technique for the Laplace transform. Bell System Tech. J. 61 (1982), no. 8, 1995--2002.

  27. Jagerman, D. L. An inversion technique for the Laplace transform with application to approximation. Bell System Tech. J. 57 (1978), no. 3, 669--710.

  28. Jagerman, D. L. Nonstationary blocking in telephone traffic. Bell System Tech. J. 54 (1975), 625--661.

  29. Jagerman, D. L. Some properties of the Erlang loss function. Bell System Tech. J. 53 (1974), 525--551.

  30. Jagerman,D. , H. Heffes, and S. Horing. On the Design and Analysis of a Class of PCM Systems. Bell System Tech. J., 1971.

  31. Jagerman, David Information theory and approximation of bandlimited functions. Bell System Tech. J. 49 (1970), 1911--1941.

  32. Jagerman, D. Epsilon-entropy and approximation of bandlimited functions. SIAM J. Appl. Math. 17 1969 362--377.

  33. Jagerman, D. Bounds for truncation error of the sampling expansion. SIAM J. Appl. Math. 14 1966 714--723.

  34. Jagerman, D. Investigation of a modified mid-point quadrature formula. Math. Comp. 20 1966 79--89.

  35. Jagerman, D. L. Some theorems concerning pseudo-random numbers. Math. Comp. 19 1965 418--426.

  36. Jagerman, D. Cosine Sum Approximation and Synthesis of Array Antennas, Bell System Tech. J., October, 1965.

  37. Jagerman, David L. The autocorrelation and joint distribution functions of the sequences. Math. Comp. 18 1964 211--232.

  38. Jagerman, David L. The autocorrelation function of a sequence uniformly distributed modulo 1. Ann. Math. Statist. 34 1963 1243--1252.

  39. Jagerman, D., and L. Fogel. Some General Aspects of the Sampling Theorem. Institute of radio Engineers, Information Theory Transactions, 1956.