Guestbook

*****

Being a graduate student for Stanley (88-92) was a great honor
and an immense intellectual experience. Through his
direction I acquired many insights into physics and understood
the many levels of depth at which a problem could be understood.
Stanley is a gentleman and a scholar. I am grateful for the time
he has give me.

Arjun Berera

*****

In May of 1958 I (a recently appointed physics professor at UCB) was
attending an APS meeting in Washington, D.C. when I noticed in the program a
10-min talk to be given by someone named Stanley Mandelstam--unknown to me.
The subject was one on which I had been working--the extension to momentum
transfer of energy dispersion relations. I had encountered difficulties that
had blocked me and which I felt sure were beyond the capacity of the unknown
theorist. I attended the talk expecting to point out problems of which the
ingenue was unaware.
    The talk was to me incomprehensible, so I said nothing in public but
cornered the speaker afterward and sat with him for two hours on a sofa in
the Shoreham Hotel lobby while the unknown attempted to explain to me what
he had done. At the end I still didn't understand Mandelstam's reasoning but
felt absolutely sure he had solved the problem.
    Stanley told me he was a postdoc at Columbia where nobody was
interested in what he was doing. I asked if he would move to Berkeley and he
instantly agreed. I went to a lobby phone, called Bob Karplus who was
administering a theoretical physics Federal contract in Berkeley, and
Stanley was brought on board.
    Despite huge subsequent interest in double dispersion relations,
including efforts by many mathematical physicists to establish or disprove
their validity, and their role as a stimulant of both analytic S-matrix
theory (via Landau) and of string theory (via Veneziano), Stanley tells me
that no proof or disproof has ever occurred.

Geoff Chew

*****

After half a century for each of us here in Berkeley what can I say, Stanley, but wonderful congratulations to you and best wishes for continued good works.

Charlie Schwartz

*****

Though Geoff Chew only became acquainted with you in 1958, we in Rudi
Peierls' department in Birmingham, England already had appreciated and
benefited from your deep knowledge and intuition in theoretical physics.
As your officemate the year before you went to Columbia, I remember your
heightened (perhaps more accurately deepened) appreciation of unitarity
that lead you to the discovery of the Mandelstam representation and that
10 minute talk you gave at the APS meeting in Washington.

You worked assiduously in our office every day. Though many of us tried we
always failed to engage you in our after-lunch volleyball games.
But it was a good year, a remarkable year in physics in which those of us
working in 'the department' shared with pleasure learning of those
wonderful experimental discoveries and meeting the great theorists who
came to Birmingham. In particular I remember your description of the
departmental dinner Genia Peierls made in honor of Wolfgang Pauli which I
missed because of a very bad cold. It was so much fun hearing your
recounting of it, after all I didn't feel so sorry to have missed it.

From the perspective of our time as postdocs, it is very remarkable that
we're here in California nearing 80. You are a bit ahead of me, but not
by much. Though it will be difficult for me to celebrate your birthday
with you at the Stanleyfest in Santa Barbara, I'm glad to have this
opportunity to wish you a very happy birthday and many happy returns.

Nina Byers

*****

(I truly regret that I cannot attend this symposium, due to previous commitments.
Being a graduate student under Stanley Mandelstam (1969-72) to me was a great honor and privilege that I will always cherish. I learned several profound lessons from him that will stay with me for the rest of my life. One thing I learned from him is to appreciate the power and elegance of symmetry and geometry, rather than be trapped in tedious algebra. At that time, I was working on trying to unitarize the Veneziano model, by following the path set by K. Kikkawa, B. Sakita, and M.A. Virasoro, i.e. by adding multiloop amplitudes. Very soon, I was immersed in a thicket of algebra, trying to use brute force to calculate all possible bosonic multi-loop dual amplitudes. But I will never forget the day that Stanley went to the blackboard and, using symmetry arguments alone, “guessed” the final answer, including its singularity structure. I was stunned. I had never seen anything like that before. Hurriedly, I went back to my calculations and tediously verified all details of his conjecture, including the nature of the multi-loop singularity. Later, Stanley, in a series of path breaking papers, outlined the complete light cone quantization of the interacting string. With Kikkawa, we then formulated string theory entirely in terms of a second quantized string field theory. I explained our results to Stanley one day in his living room, but he insisted that something was missing. Using symmetry and geometrical arguments alone, he claimed that two open strings can touch each other at an interior point. He took our some paper, a pair of scissors, Scotch tape, and then began to piece together an elaborate, Origami-style structure in front of me, the four-string interaction. Again, I was stunned. This was an interaction that we missed when cataloging the complete interaction terms of string field theory. Again, I rushed back and then verified that Stanley was right once again.
The second thing I learned from Stanley is that long hours spent patiently working out the minute details of a calculation often pay off. I would often work late at night, and would find Stanley working late hours as well. As a result, he was always easy to find. (Other grad students would sometimes bitterly complain that their thesis advisor was always absent. I never had that problem, since Stanley was often in his office working late at night, like myself.)

Michio Kaku
City Univ. of New York

If you wish to send a public birthday message to Stanley, send it to joep@kitp.ucsb.edu for posting on this page.