Abstract

Symmetry: Culture and Science
Volume 35, Number 3, pages 235-236 (2024)
https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2024_3_235

THE LEGACY OF OUR FATHER AND HIS PASSION FOR SYMMETRY

Anikó Darvas and Gergely Darvas

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My brother and I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be here and take part in the commemoration of our father. It is a heartening to be among the people and the community that was so important to him, and to see that what he considered his intellectual life’s work continues to thrive. He was proud to have been instrumental in the development of Symmetrology as a science in its own right.

You asked me to say a few words today, and we have thought carefully about what to share. You know his scientific life's work and his science-organizing activities better than we do. We knew him as a father. Where did these two aspects meet?

I think it was in the way he viewed the world and the values in which he raised us. His love of books, his almost unshakeable belief that the world could be made better by the cultivation of science, the arts, and culture - these were the foundations upon which he believed the world should be built. These ideas are intertwined in symmetry, and although I may never fully understand his book Hypersymmetry, I understand from it that he believed in a great big order underlying our world. He discovered pieces of this order, but he did not have the chance to work out all the details. Honestly, whether he was pondering an intriguing aspect of physics or pointing out something new and big, only time will tell.

As a father, he was the same - I grew up with books and he showed us many wonders of the world. I remember when I was probably five years old, during a conversation, he used a globe, a ping-pong ball, and a flashlight to explain a solar eclipse to me.

My brother recalls Dad using a protractor, a ruler and sunlight shining through the living room window to show him how to determine the latitude of Budapest. We did not live a high standard of living, but I was the first in my class to have a Commodore 64 at home, and it was not just for playing games - I was given a book to learn programming through play...