In Memoriam: Washek Pfeffer

Our colleague Washek Pfeffer passed away on January 3, 2021, he was 84. Born in Prague as Václav Franticek Pfeffer on November 14, 1936, he changed his name to Washek Pfeffer when he became a US citizen in 1970. He joined the UC Davis Department of Mathematics in 1966, retiring in 1994.

One of Washek’s middle school classmates later rose to prominence, Václav Havel, the famous playwright and President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and of the Czech Republic (1993-2003). Washek and Václav became close friends in the 1950s.

The son of an inventor and a high-end seamstress, Washek spent his first year of high school in a hospital bed, studying largely independently, with homework assignments delivered through classmates. Classmate Zdenek Bažant, eventually a professor at Northwestern, described Washek as popular, gregarious, irreverent, a regular visitor to pubs and nightclubs, who still managed to score top grades. Washek received his Doctor of Natural Sciences in 1960 from Charles University and a Ph.D. under the direction of Joaquin Basilio Diaz from the University of Maryland College Park in 1966 with a dissertation entitled An Integral in Topological Spaces.

Washek’s zest for life translated into mathematical productivity: He published over 100 research articles, including one last year, Comparing chains in Banach space. One of his heavily cited articles, joint with Eric van Douwen, concerns Some properties of the Sorgenfrey line and related spaces.

He will be missed.