Professor Pays Ultimate Tribute to Prized Student

Alex Barany was the kind of student that every teacher dreams of knowing. He was bright and gifted, compassionate, committed to his work. His academic adviser called him the kind of human being “the world needs,” the kind who are always in terribly short supply.

On the night of Aug. 27, Barany came home from UC San Diego, where he was studying for a Ph.D. For the first time all day, he allowed himself to lean back and relax with his two favorite people, his wife and his 2-year-old son, Aaron. His wife read him Dan Quayle jokes from the newspaper.

They enjoyed a few laughs, and then, without warning, Barany passed out.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened. Over a period of months, he had passed out several times but would wake up after a few hours with no aftereffects. He had been medically tested for the problem, but no one could figure it out.

This time, despite the harried attempts of paramedics to bring him back, Barany didn’t wake up. To this day, doctors don’t know the cause of death.

The San Diego County coroner’s office conducted an autopsy on Barany. “He did show a history of fainting spells over the past two years, but as far as the cause of death, we were unable to make that determination,” Deputy Coroner Max Murphy said.

Barany, who was 32, had almost completed work on a doctoral dissertation, “Noise and Non-Linear Recording Phenomena in Thin Metallic Films.”

Even his widow, Laura Klein, 33, says with a laugh, “It’s not something I really understand. . . . I know it has something to do with noise.”

But Neal Bertram, who holds one of four endowed chairs at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research, judged Barany’s paper to be richly significant, so much so that he decided to finish it himself. It wasn’t every day that a doctoral supervisor, especially one as distinguished as Bertram, suspended his own research to finish a student’s paper.

But Barany was no ordinary student, and this was no ordinary paper.

“Had he lived, his contribution to the scientific world would have been enormous,” Bertram said with a sigh.

The nature of Barany’s work may be difficult for a lay person to understand. Even his wife, who is bright and articulate, said, “It just always looked like a bunch of numbers on a page to me.”

Bertram saw it as nothing less than the seeds of a breakthrough. It has to do with why noise or hiss exists in magnetic recording, particularly in computer storage, and what can be done to correct the problem. Bertram said this type of research and this type of student are what America needs to compete with the Japanese.

Barany’s obituary in the department newsletter noted that an interest in communications, combined with a background in physics, “suited him to the study of noise in recording media. For the past few years, Alex had been working on theoretical studies of noise and non-linear bit shift in thin metallic films.

“His thesis, which was almost complete at the time of his death, will be presented by Professor Bertram to the reviewing committee and the Ph.D. is expected to be conferred posthumously.” (The degree was official at the end of March; Barany’s diploma will be mailed out this summer.)

Completing the paper subjected Bertram, 47, to the same tedium and drudgery that all graduate students go through--and which he hadn’t suffered in years. He had to verify captions and mathematical formulas, write portions of the final chapter, complete the appendix, file the original on cotton paper and fill out the Byzantine forms that academic committees require and pore over in meticulous detail.

“I had help,” Bertram said modestly, adding quickly that no one who assisted seemed to mind--Barany was the kind of person “everyone loved.”

“He was brilliant, and he had initiative,”

Bertram said. “You pray that students will be able to figure out problems for themselves, to think for themselves, to show leadership. He had all of those qualities. He was exceptional. I’ve never had a student quite like him.

“And, as a person, well, he was a real sweetie-pie. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was always coming in with some great joke. I’ll always remember how cheery he was, how friendly, tireless, committed and caring he was. He would have made an enormous contribution to the world. He was giving, absolutely selfless, and the way he died . . . was tragic.”

Even so, why did Bertram finish the work? No one would have thought badly had he simply mourned and let the paper stand, 90% complete.

“He was gone. It was a loss, a tragedy,” Bertram said, “but here was one thing that wouldn’t be a loss. I could get that thing published, and it would be there forever to benefit the world. So, you see, I couldn’t let it go. The work was wonderful .”

Despite Bertram’s commitment, Laura Klein was “surprised” by the lengths to which he went.

“It made me feel really proud,” she said. “The paper was so important to Alex. But he, too, would have been surprised by Professor Bertram’s contribution. It would have meant so much to him, maybe even embarrassed him a little. He was shy about things like that. But, in the end, he would have been thrilled.”

Her husband had an intense drive to see something through, to get it done, and, in the end, she said, that would have left him ecstatic. Even in death, Barany’s paper got finished.

Klein misses her husband, as does their son, Aaron Barany, now 2 1/2. The death of a father hasn’t struck home with one so young, but at first, Klein did notice confusion. Aaron would toddle to the car and look back, sensing that it must be time to pick up Dad from work. Now, he stares at pictures of his father and says simply, “Daddy.”

Barany was fascinated with sub-tropical plants and, along with his wife, was a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers Assn. Bertram said rare fruit conformed to a theme--Barany preferred the unusual, the esoteric, the extraordinary, in his work and in his life. The professor thought the gesture of finishing a student’s paper a fitting match to a man whose talents, in every way possible, towered above the norm.

“It’s hard to put into words what type of mark Alex wanted to leave on the world,” Klein said. “He was very concerned with environment, with his work, with doing a good job. It was so important to him to live. . . . He so wanted not to have a negative impact on the Earth. And, to the end, he was true to that, in every way.”