The world lost a great physicist in the premature death of Bunji Sakita. But for me, like many others who were fortunate enough to have come under his spell, it is a great personal loss as well.
I remember vividly the day he came to Madison, Wisconsin in 1959, to begin his post-doctoral appointment. He arrived in a beaten up old car with one pink colored front door. I was the first one to greet him at the physics department and show him around. Since that first day, the bond of our friendship only grew tighter. Later, I welcomed his wife Masako joining him in Madison, and shared their joy with the birth of Mariko and Taro. My wife and our three daughters became close family friends to the Sakita family.
In 1964, Bunji joined the Argonne National Laboratory, where following the tradition of Robert Sachs summer institutes in Madison, I had established a Visitor Consultant Program that drew in physicists from all over the world. Bunji had just completed his work on nonrelativistic SU(6) and was thinking of its relativistic version with Louis Michel. As it was running into some fundamental difficulties, he turned his attention to a phenomenological approach and invited me to work with him. We worked intensively during the fall of 1964 and by the end of the fall, we were ready to publish the main results. Bunji was invited to the Coral Gables Conference in January of 1965 and went there with a hand written copy of the paper. We were planning to submit the manuscript to Physical Review Letters. I received a call from Bunji from Coral Gables, telling me that Salam gave a talk on a relativistic SU(6) scheme that was identical to ours. He said he gave Salam our paper, Salam read it and agreed that the two schemes were identical. We were delighted - we didnÕt have to worry about the publication of our paper in the Physical Review Letters. We didnÕt have to worry about publicity. SalamÕs name would take care of all that. Those were heady days. Indeed, claims and counterclaims of a grand breakthrough came and went. We went on to write a detailed longer paper fully realizing that it was just a phenomenological model.
Our work led Salam to invite us as Visiting Scientists to his International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, where our families spent the spring semester of 1967 together. Towards the end of this stay, at the invitation of Harry Lipkin, Bunji and I traveled to Israel for a ten days' visit to the Weizman Institute. As we sat in Rome waiting for our flight, we heard news of the impending war between Israel and its neighboring Arab countries and the travel advisory from U.S. Government to stay away from the Middle East. We continued on and arrived in Israel, first time for both of us, to what turned out to be a grim situation. The President of the Weizman Institute informed all foreign visitors that they were free to leave. They were absolved of any commitments. But we stubbornly stayed on. We were invited for a visit lasting ten days. We will stay for ten days, we said. All the Israeli physicists were drafted into the military. Only the foreigners like us that included Gabriel Veneziano, Miguel Virasoro and Hector Rubinstein were in the department. Harry Lipkin arranged informal discussion seminars during the day, but evenings were silent and fearful. Bunji and I shared a room in St. Martin dormitory, whose windows were blackened because the whole town was under a blackout. We played Battle Ship and drank Johnny Walker Black Label (Tax Free purchase). Bunji rarely talked about himself, but for the first time he told me his experiences in the fire bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. The situation in Israel recalled for him those scary times. We completed our ten days and we left on Sunday, June 4, 1967 for Ankara and Istanbul. The very next morning, in Ankara, we heard -- WAR HAD BEGUN.
Bunji returned to Madison in 1968 and later to City College, New York in 1971. Our research interests followed different directions, but our friendship only got stronger, as our families spent many Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays together. I never stopped marveling at BunjiÕs sharp intellect and insights in physics, his modesty and generosity and his compassion. Physics was not an end in itself for either of us. Working with Bunji was one of the most exciting period in my life, and the lifelong friendship it brought will remain as one of my most cherished memories.
Professor Kameshwar Wali
Syracuse University
I had the chance to meet Bunji Sakita at a key moment in my career as a physicist and our direct interaction lasted 2 crucial years but his figure kept growing all along my life. I assign this lasting influence to his model of life, guided by demanding ethical values accompanied by a strong will and untiring motivation.
I was in Israel when Bunji and K.C. Wali came for a visit. It was May 1967, the hectic days preceding the Six Days War and less than 5 months after I left Argentina for the first time. Gabriele Veneziano, Hector Rubinstein, Zvi Lipkin were there and we had many memorable discussions on the 'hot' subjects of that time. Sakita was already quite famous and I was impressed by his mastery of all subjects.
When one year later I had to plan a continuation of my post-doctoral training I sent a handwritten letter to Bunji with some follow-up to our discussions. I was very happy to receive in return an offer from him for a Post-Doc fellowship at Wisconsin. I immediately accepted and left Israel for Argentina to get married.
In Madison I met C. Goebel, Keiji Kikkawa and one year later C.S. Hsue. We worked almost exclusively on generalizing and deepening the understanding of the Veneziano Model. Our interaction was fruitful and I learned a lot from it. In particular from Bunji I learned to defocus from the immediate problem to try to grab the general picture. Two anecdotes somehow remained impressed on me and perhaps changed my later attitude in research. On the "ghost killing mechanism in Dual Models" I was obviously excited with the calculation of the action of the gauge operators on the vertex. When I told Bunji, his immediate suggestion was to complete it with the calculation of the commutators between the gauge operators. On the "Feynman like diagrams compatible with duality" , he kept worrying that the duality counting of diagrams could prove difficult to reconcile with a Field Theoretic approach to strings. I could not understand his concern at that moment -and in fact the discrepancy does not appear in the Light Cone formulation- but later it has been nagging all covariant formulations.
Later in our lives we met again, several times in New York and in Paris. Scientifically our interests began to diverge but this led me to a deeper appreciation of him as a human being. If I have to summarize his complex personality I would talk about heroic honesty, a virtue that obliged him to see the bad side of reality but did not allow him to do anything to make it easier for him. Faithful to his culture he gave uncompromising value to his word. Trustworthiness and reliability characterized him. He was not joyous, he did not demonstrate easily his happiness. Still I liked him as all of those who had the chance to know him deeply did.
He remains among us for his important work but also in our hearts for this unique courage. As I said at the beginning, today I realized what a great chance it was for me to meet him.
Professor Miguel A. Virasoro
Dipartimento di Fisica
Universita' di Roma1 "La Sapienza"
Roma, ITALY
Former Director
Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Trieste, ITALY
Unfortunately it is quite impossible for me to physically participate in the Memorial Service of Prof. Bunji Sakita, this coming Friday (December 13, 2002). Let this message be a testimony of my unbearable sorrow for his untimely passing away. His memory will remain with me for as long as I live.
Professor Jean-Loup Gervais
Ecole Normale Superiore
Paris, FRANCE
I still have very fond memories of those days in the late 70's when Bunji's leadership was a great source of inspiration to do good physics at CCNY despite many handicaps. As Mike (Kaku) will remember, we were a small group but we always had big ideas for physics, thanks to Bunji. He always told us that you can do good physics regardless of where you are and showed it by example. After I left CCNY for Maryland, I remained undecided for good six months whether to stay at Maryland or go back to CCNY and a major reason for this was Bunji and the congenial environment for physics that he created at CCNY. I will miss my good friend Bunji a great deal but will always remember him as a very ordinary and plain speaking man who had an extraordinary impact on his friends and the field of physics.
Professor Rabinder Mohapatra
University of Maryland
Bunji Sakita came to Rochester in 1956, having already received a Master's degree from the University of Nagoya. At that time Rochester was home to a young and distinguished group of theorists. Led by Robert Marshak, it included Charles Goebel, George Sudarshan and Susumu Okubo. It was also the time of the "eightfold way" and of the prolific discoveries of new "particles" and of their excited states.
Many graduate students were attracted to high energy theory and among Sakita's contemporaries were Johan (J.J.) deSwart, Francis Troyon, Martin Spergel, and Syurei Iwao. The atmosphere was congenial and exciting, with new ideas being shared among all.
Sakita graduated in 1959 with a thesis on "The Application of Dispersion Relations to Leptonic Decays" under the direction of Charles Goebel and he followed Goebel as a postdoc to the University of Wisconsin that same year.
While at Wisconsin, Sakita did his seminal work introducing the SU(6) symmetry to classify not only the flavor but also the spin states of the quarks. He also wrote fundamental papers on the dual resonance model and was quickly promoted to Full Professor at Wisconsin.
When Marshak assumed the presidency of City College in 1970, he invited Sakita to join the Faculty at CCNY as a Distinguished Professor. Sakita accepted and this gave him the opportunity to build a strong particle theory group at CCNY. He also continued his work on supersymmetry and string theory, with his students and his collaborator J. L. Gervais. Professor Sakita's work had a large impact on the field of high energy physics. Between 1972 (when citation indexes to scientific papers began compiling statistics) and today, Sakita's papers were cited 3200 times.
We were fortunate that Sakita's daughter Mariko did her undergraduate studies at Rochester. Thus there were many occasions when Sakita visited Rochester and would bring us up to date on his recent work. He remained a loyal friend of Rochester throughout his professional career, and his colleagues at Rochester loved and admired him. We lost not only an always cheerful, long-time friend but also a dedicated and highly creative colleague from the "golden age" of particle theory.
Professor Arie Bodek
Chair
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Rochester
I am very sad that I cannot be with you today, and even sadder that I did not get to spend more time with Bunji in these past few years. I will always treasure the memories of the five years I spent with Professor Sakita at City College. Bunji had a deep and profound understanding of our subject, and taught me a great deal -- about field theory and collective coordinates, about string theory, about path integrals. He also taught me much about teaching.
I also remember many stories he told, about his youth in Japan, of rigid religious instruction, of the war, about Robert Marshak and the development of the Graduate Program at CCNY (including his complaint that with Marshak's busy schedule, theory seminars had to be held early in the morning). I also think of stories about him. Last year, when I was one of the few visitors to the Weizmann Institute, people reminded me how Bunji and Professor Wali visited in 1967, at a time when war was imminent. By late May of that year, all foreign visitors had left -- except the two of them. Perhaps it was growing up in wartime Japan made him oblivious to the dangers, but I think it was something more -- a loyalty to his friends, and an unwillingness to desert them.
Finally, there are lots of little ways in which Bunji still influences my life. He spoke often of his children, and I admired him as a loving and caring father. While I saw and spoke with Bunji from time to time since leaving CCNY, I have missed him since those days and thought of him often; all the more so now.
Professor Michael Dine
University of California at Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California.
(Bunji Sakita and I) have been colleagues at the Physics Department of City College NY since I joined the Department in 1974. When I last saw him, a few months ago he was optimistic that his cancer had been successfully treated by the best surgeons he consulted, and despite his having lost much weight, I was happy to look forward to many more years of interacting with him. So this sad news is a deep shock to me.
For these twentyeight years we have often spoken together on all sorts of topics and especially on problems which could have some overlap between field theory and condensed matter. Professor Sakita had the ability to see clearly and brilliantly through a problem to the theoretical kernel, and then --having isolated it-- to solve this central problem in the most elegant and concise fashion. His interests in the last years on Quantum Hall Effect bears witness to this, and other topics also could be added such as his work on random (disordered) systems and before that (12 years ago) on possible mechanisms for the (then recently discovered) cuprate high-temperature superconductors. Additionally we shared a long-standing interest in dynamical symmetries of many-body systems.
We shared also a very deep and common interest in the future of the Physics Department at City College. In this, we had many long and serious discussions about the directions in which the Department should develop and we shared as well our evaluations of the several junior (now senior) colleagues who were invited to join our faculty. In this area too I greatly valued his insight and his judgement and his dedication to improving our faculty.
In recent years our faculty strength has diminished ,and I profoundly regret that Bunji Sakita will no longer be able to share in the work and satisfaction of restoring this strength.
It was a privilege for me to call Professor Sakita my colleague during these years, and I shall always retain the memory of our happier and productive times together at City College.
Professor Joseph L. Birman
Distinguished Professor of Physics
City College of the CUNY
Bunji Sakita was the most soft-spoken particle theorist that I ever met. What is surprising is that he established an extraordinary reputation in a field where it is often the case that those who "make lots of noise" are the ones who get the attention. This truly gentle soul and great scientist will be very much missed.
Professor Stuart Samuel
(Formerly of) City College of the CUNY
I met Professor Bunji Sakita many years ago when I was a graduate student at Syracuse and he came to give a seminar. Thereafter, we saw each other a few times on similar occasions, but it was only after I came to City College that I really got to know him. I had known all along about Bunji's deservedly famous work on many areas of physics, but I soon learnt to appreciate and respect his integrity and sense of fairness to others, which was even self-effacing at times.
In my beginning years at City College, I faced a very difficult time arising from budgetary and related problems here. Bunji's support and encouragement were very important to me.
For the last so many years, we would have lunch together whenever he was at City College and we would talk about everything- about politics, the politics of physics, about war-time Japan, his life in Japan, Rochester, Wisconsin, about plays he had recently seen, even about work he wanted done on his apartment, but most of all about physics, every aspect of it, hours and hours of it. It was very enjoyable for me, because I think we had similar ways of thinking about physics, and I believe Bunji liked it too, for physics was the overriding passion of his life. I am happy I had the privilege to call him my friend; indeed, he will be sorely missed.
Professor V. Parameswaran Nair
City College of the CUNY
I met Professor Sakita thirteen years ago when I came to City College as a postdoc. I soon came to realize that underneath the quiet facade there is wisdom and a deep understanding of physics. It took me a little more time to also appreciate and cherish over the years that behind the cool, not very expressive exterior, there was a warm, gentle and caring human being, a person of humility, strict integrity and generosity.
When I met him, Professor Sakita was interested in work at the interface of condensed matter and high energy physics, with a particular emphasis on the physics of quantum Hall effect. Soon after I came to City College I started working with him on these topics. Our collaboration continued on and off for the next several years all the way to the end.
The periods I worked with him were some of my most exciting, intense and gratifying times of my physics carreer. It was such a pleasure to work with him. He always had many new ideas he was ready to share, always patient to teach me things I didn't know, always ready to listen. There was also a little secret reason that made talking to him so effortless for me. After so many years in this country, Professor Sakita's spoken English was far from perfect, as people who were close to him know very well. This way I didn't have to worry about my own not so good English; in fact it sounded better than his.
Continuously thinking about physics and working hard on the ideas he wanted to pursue further became a way of life for him which continued way after he retired. In fact his retiring at what can be considered as an early age these days and during an active stage researchwise was to me an act of loyalty to his younger colleagues. Professor Sakita was the head of the high energy theory group here at City College through good times and hard times. It was during such a difficult time when the positions of the younger faculty were threatened that he decided to retire, partly to make room for his younger colleagues. And this was also done in his characteristic dignified, quiet way.
He was not only a great physicist, but also a person of strong integrity, straight judgement, unpretentious, a person loyal to his colleagues and collaborators with a strong sense of duty and what is the right thing to do.
Our last project together started couple months before he left for Japan where he was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer. Although he knew there was little time left he kept on working even from his hospital bed under chemotherapy treatment. His last entry on his notebook, one of many where he would neatly write his calculations and ideas half in English, half in Japanese was on August 20. His last e-mail to me somewhat optimistic about the effect of his chemotherapy treatment was on August 22. I was supposed to visit him in Japan in September to talk more about our project. I never made it, he passed away on August 31st.
The physics community will miss a great physicist and a deep thinker, many of us here will miss a generous and wise collaborator and mentor, a great friend who touched our lives in so many ways.
Professor Dimitra Karabali
Lehman College of the CUNY
Bronx, New York
I came to know Prof.Bunji Sakita in the fall of 1982, when I took the Advanced Quantum Mechanics course from him. The following semester we (the students) were asked to cover one chapter each from the yet to be published field theory book by Itzykson and Zuber. He used to sit and carefully observe the derivations, pointing out the historical perspectives of the major developments in field theory. His insistence on working out everything, in one's own hand and the pleasure he used to derive from the same, is still fresh in my memory. He was a superb teacher, pleasant and affectioate, yet stern if there was slight carelessness, in carrying out any calculation. My association with him continued during my summer and winter visits to City College, from the University of Rochester. Each time, he would arrange a table for me, with some calculations ready to be carried out. Many hours, we used to spend on the black board, where his ability to simplify very difficult problems, after staring at them for hours, had a deep impression on me.
Once discovering him playing the game GO in his office, I was surprised by his explanation. He was trying to figure out the electron pairing mechanism of high-Tc superconductors! Often he used to say that, he had enjoyed his earlier phenomenological works, I guess his later involvement with fractional quantum Hall system and other condensed matter areas, reflected his desire to be closer to nature. His jubilation was like that of a child, when he was able to derive the current in Incommensurate Charge Density wave, through axial anomaly.
We had the good opportunity to host him at University of Hyderabad, where he spent enmormous amount of time, listening and carefully answering the queries of students and faculties. His energy, enthusiasim,scholarship and zest towards life, percolated to one and all. It is hard to believe that Prof.Sakita is no more. He will still have a strong presence, in the minds of generations of physicists to come, through his monumental works and lucid books.
Professor Prasanta Panigrahi
Physical Research Laboratory
INDIA
I first met Bunjii Sakita in the fall of 1979 when I entered the Ph.D. program in physics at CCNY. The thing that I noticed immediately was his capability of using very few words to describe complex physical (and human, sometimes) situations. I was impressed because I, on the contrary, was (and I still am) quite logorrhoeic. Despite these different characters, we got along very well. He was basically every day coming to my office and controlling me by asking what I was doing in physics. My replies varied from " nothing" to "something worth the Nobel prize" but he always respected my ideas even if, many times, he knew from the beginning that they were either wrong or totally crazy. Even with this total freedom I always felt his severe eyes on me and I still do....!!.
After I left New York we met mostly in Italy in Trieste and he loved the scenery there and the art and the history and again he was able to encapsulate the magic of the things in few words.... I will miss him very much.
Professor Ennio Gozzi
University of Trieste