Steven Vajda - Vignettes

Vignettes

Steven Vajda had a lively spirit and a gentle sense of humour. He would sometimes tell stories about himself, such as his tale of crossing the Canadian border shortly after the war. Steven was on an official trip to the USA and he was, of course, using his new British passport, after several years without proper travel documents. He crossed into Canada to see Niagara Falls. Entering Canada with a British passport was no problem, but when he returned to the US, the border control officer looked at him unsympathetically, took his passport into his sentry box and thumbed through it. He then looked out at Steven and said in a stern voice, “Do you know what I’m going to do with your passport?” Steven, visions of a seized passport and internment flashing before him, offered a meek, “No… what?”, to which the officer replied “I’m going to stamp it.”

Steven enjoyed the democratic spirit and freedom of movement that a British passport represented. Once, while attending a conference in Vienna while that city was still subject to a postwar, Soviet-supervised, neutrality, Steven was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. Several fellow mathematicians saw him remonstrating with the officer of the law and pointing to his passport. Later, his colleagues insisted that Steven was playing at not speaking German, but he said rather that he was affirming his right, as a British subject, to walk where and when he pleased.

Despite his dislike of some of the Austrian governments of the 20th century, Steven remained a Viennese, a Habsburg-era Austro-Hungarian at heart. He was a man of great culture. The last time that I saw him, shortly before his death, my wife and I visited the Brighton Pavilion, now a museum, with him. Knowing that my wife is an art-history graduate, he turned to her and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “I am just a mathematician, tell me all about this building and the paintings it contains.” As it happened, she had in fact read a good deal about the Pavilion during her studies and she did quite well. Steven gave her a good grade, and then guided us through the galleries, speaking masterfully and in great detail about the paintings and of the relationships between trends in painting and music throughout the ages. His font of knowledge went far beyond mathematics.