Don Joffray and Steve Strogatz

Steven Strogatz ’76 says that, for the first 10 years of his long correspondence with Loomis Chaffee mathematics teacher Donald Joffray, “it didn’t occur to me to save [the letters]. . . . I like to think I’ve grown up and learned something since then.”

Steve spoke last evening at Loomis Chaffee about his new book, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math, which is based on that correspondence, which Steve says comprises more than 200 letters exchanged over more than 30 years. Steve had spent the day on campus, visiting math classes and giving an a talk to students on "Sync," the subject of his work in the theory of spontaneous order.

Don and his family were in attendance at the evening event, marking the first time Steve has given the talk with Don present.

According to Steve, when his wife first learned of the letters, she teased him about how little he knew about Don after corresponding with me for so many years. “She said, ‘That’s such a guy thing.’ Her teasing got me thinking a little bit. Maybe there’s a greater story there. What is the nature of this friendship of 35 years? I went from 15 to 50; he went from 45 to 80.  A lot of life can happen in that time. Maybe there are bigger lessons for all of us.”

Steve’s respect and affection for Don is clear. “He was always happy. He was big, happy, bounding with energy.  He saw math everywhere around him. We could see math too because he taught us how.”

Don also showed immense respect for his students. “There were sometimes in the middle of a lecture, when he would space out, and you could tell what was about to happen. He would start to get this dreamy, far-away look and then he would say,  ’This reminds of the time that Jamie Williams found a formula for nth term of the Fibonacci sequence.’ In his telling, Jamie Williams was some kind of God of Mathematics, like Zeus, like you were hearing about someone in Pantheon, more than Zeus, it would be like Riemann, or Gauss, or Newton. “

“You didn’t even have to be a good student to earn a place in the Pantheon. There was Alex Feldman. He was good, not Jamie Williams, but he was good. Alex Feldman asked a question, that was a good question, that became immortalized as the Alex Feldman problem.  What was interesting was that Alex Feldman couldn’t solve the Alex Feldman problem.  Still, his name was enshrined alongside Jamie Williams and Gauss and Newton because he had posed the Alex Feldman problem, so year after year students would hear about that.”

The correspondence with Don began when Steve was in college. “For some reason I didn’t understand, I wrote to him. . . . Then, something shocking happened, he started asking me questions. This was really thrilling for me, because I always wanted to be a teacher, but as a college student, I was stuck, I had no students.  So, he was my first student.”

Over the years, the correspondence continued, but Steve found it increasingly difficult to keep up due to demands of work and family. The letters from Don piled up, unread. Even a letter from Don written shortly after he suffered a stroke went unanswered. 

Finally, one letter “dislodged” him, a condolence letter from Don after the death of Steve’s brother, Ian.

“Come on, you’ve got to warm up a little here,” Steve says of himself.

“When I look at these letters, I always think that we wrote about math, but actually, I was the one who only wrote about math. He was always opening the door to a more emotional – you know, not wide – but there were always little openings, for me to say more about my life or to respond what he said about his, but, like a good teacher, he knew I wasn’t ready to go through that door.  He never fussed about it; he just opened it. And finally, maybe because I had my own kids then, I was finally ready.”

Steve says that he and Don don’t write about math anymore, and, while that is “a little sad” their friendship continues to grow.

After Steve answered some questions from the audience, Don had the last word.

“I go to class. I walk in. The students say: ‘Any letters from Strogatz today? I say that’s the dessert. First, we have the main course.”

Read about Steve's other LC mentors: DiCurcio and Johnson