Last Years
Ilya showed great strength in battling Parkinson's disease for the last 30 years of his life. His condition worsened in the last 10 years to the point where he was barely able to move and speak, but thanks to extraordinary love and care of his wife Edith, Ilya was still able to travel to many mathematical conferences and keep mathematical contacts. With the help of James Cogdell he was able to continue at the highest level of research until almost his last days.
Ilya was an amateur chess player and loved playing chess with his children. In the last 10 years, when it became difficult for him to move and even speak, he still played chess and checkers as a way of communicating with them, and sometimes was even winning.
Read more about this topic: Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Spring still makes spring in the mind,
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)