Dean Huffman, September 7, 2015 – Yale Class of 1969

Following is the eulogy I gave for Dean at a memorial service in November, 2015:

Dr. Dean G. Huffman, February 16, 1947—September 7, 2015, Portage, Michigan, Age 68.

Dean passed away at home on September 7, 2015. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of the late Dean DeWitt and Grace (Gardner) Huffman. He was also preceded in passing by his brother, Myles Miller. Dean excelled at education from a young age and went on to achieve many academic accomplishments. He received a B.A. and Masters in Mathematics from Yale. While at Yale, Dean twice placed in the top five in the national Putman Mathematical Competition, including in the top three in his senior year (the top three competitors are not ranked individually). He would further his education by earning an M.D. from the Medical School of Ohio at Toledo, and would later become a subspecialist in Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Dean served our country honorably as a general medical officer in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War era. On July 31, 1982, he married the love of his life Joanne (Thieme) Huffman. I am proud to say that my wife Sally and I introduced Dean and Joanne while Dean was interning at Stamford, Connecticut Hospital, though it took two tries before they seemed to click. I thought that their senses of humor were well-matched.

Dean was an avid reader who enjoyed computers, watching baseball, and The Ohio State University football team. He also enjoyed movies, trivia and taking cruises with his family. Dean had a great sense humor and was loved by his patients, his family and friends. He was excited and proud about becoming a grandfather in October to Daphne Engelman. He will be missed by all who knew him. He also leaves to cherish his memory, two daughters, Becky and Annie Huffman; two nephews; and many great friends and colleagues.

I first met Dean our first day on campus, when we and our parents bumped into each other in our entryway in Vanderbilt Hall near dinner time. On the spur of the moment, the six of us decided to go to dinner together and so a 50-year friendship began.

As those who knew him the longest know, Dean’s most prominent characteristics perhaps were his love and talent for mathematics and his mischievous sense of humor. Not being a denizen of the ivory tower, he was pleased to share math jokes with his classmates, however little qualified they were to understand them without a little postjoke tutoring. One that still sticks in my mind is one he told when grape-based jokes were a fad: “What’s purple and commutes? An ibelian grape.” He then explained that in mathematics an ibelian group is a set of numbers that has the property of commutation (meaning that equations in such a group were reversible—they worked the same backwards and forwards). (I realized only yesterday that this joke is also a pun—grape, group.) Of course, to be sure you had learned the lesson, he would tell you such jokes on many different occasions.

But Dean’s talent for math and his willingness to share his knowledge and love of it made him a superb teacher. If I had taken freshman calculus from Dean, I am sure that I would have learned much more calculus than I already knew, instead of, as actually happened, having my command of the subject substantially degraded, because Dean had the skill and insight to explain math in ways that everyone can grasp.

For two examples:

He explained what topology is about by posing a concrete and simple question: Is it possible to comb a hairy billiard ball without having a part? If inclined, you could spend many hours contemplating a long-haired billiard ball combed with a part and whether that part could be avoided.

He proved to me that despite what your high school math teacher may have told you, one infinity can be larger than another. Simply imagine there is an infinite number of people each wearing a pair of socks. Obviously, there are twice as many socks as people even though both are infinite in number.

Dean was also a fan of Broadway musicals, especially the Music Man, the score of which he had apparently memorized. I foolishly let Dean know that I did not like musicals. The consequence was that all through sophomore year, he would tease me by singing “76 Trombones” when I dropped by his room.

Dean’s intellect was immense and despite his devotion to math—who else have you met who when a high school student would read advanced math books for fun?—I always believed that he could excel at anything he was in fact interested in. Because of his stratospheric placement in the Putnam Competition senior year, the Harvard Department of Mathematics wrote to Dean offering him a place in its Ph.D. program, including waiver of tuition and a stipend, if he applied for admission. But believing that he was already too old to make any worthy breakthroughs in math, Dean decided to opt for medicine, as we know.

Over the years, not only did Dean become an accomplished physician but he broadened and evolved his interests, becoming interested in, among other things, public policy and politics, and evolving his views on them as his knowledge and experience grew.

After Dean became confined to bed, a couple of times a month or so, we would have telephone conversations and talk about a wide range of topics—politics, world affairs, issues in medicine and other scientific topics, even sports—and one of the plagues of our time, unwanted telephone solicitations. Unlike most people, Dean came to welcome robocalls. He delighted in turning the tables on the callers, challenging everything they said and observing how they struggled to keep to their scripts in the face of his relentless pushing back. He believed that wasting as much of their time as he could was a public service.

A few months ago, I told him how some companies now used artificial intelligence programs and highly sophisticated voice recognition/artificial speech systems that were nearly impossible to detect to answer customer service calls—and that one cannot get such a program to admit that its dialogue is computer generated. He was fascinated. It wasn’t very long before the robocallers began using these systems to troll for marks. And not long after that, Dean happily called me to say that he was very sure he had just had a ‘conversation’ with one.

The week before his demise, Dean called me to gleefully recount his greatest triumph in his personal war against telephone solicitors. Part of Dean’s campaign to harass robocallers was to ask them to hold while he looked for some bit of information they had requested and them simply leave them hanging until he heard the howler tone indicating the caller had finally hung up. On this occasion, the caller, obviously from Bangalore or some similar location, offered to transfer Dean’s credit card balances so as to save him money. Dean said to the caller, “My credit card’s downstairs. Can you wait while I go get it?” The scammer agreed, so Dean put the receiver down on the bed to wait for the howler. Fifteen minutes later, there was still no indication that the caller had hung up, so Dean picked up the phone and told him that he couldn’t find his credit card. Could he call him back after he found it? The called said, that’s alright, I will call you back in a few minutes. A minute or two later, the phone rang and it was Dean’s new acquaintance, who was irate. He said, “When you find your credit card, you can roll it up into a tube and stuff it up [a certain bodily orifice].” He then called Dean an M.F. and hung up. Dean thought that for an (South Asian) Indian, the fellow showed good command of urban American profanity.

To the end, Dean never lost his wit and clarity.

One Comment

Eric Kemmler says:
April 25, 2019 at 11:56 am
Following is the eulogy I gave for Dean at a memorial service in November, 2015:
Dr. Dean G. Huffman, February 16, 1947—September 7, 2015, Portage, Michigan, Age 68.
Dean passed away at home on September 7, 2015. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of the late Dean DeWitt and Grace (Gardner) Huffman. He was also preceded in passing by his brother, Myles Miller. Dean excelled at education from a young age and went on to achieve many academic accomplishments. He received a B.A. and Masters in Mathematics from Yale. While at Yale, Dean twice placed in the top five in the national Putman Mathematical Competition, including in the top three in his senior year (the top three competitors are not ranked individually). He would further his education by earning an M.D. from the Medical School of Ohio at Toledo, and would later become a subspecialist in Maternal Fetal Medicine.
Dean served our country honorably as a general medical officer in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War era. On July 31, 1982, he married the love of his life Joanne (Thieme) Huffman. I am proud to say that my wife Sally and I introduced Dean and Joanne while Dean was interning at Stamford, Connecticut Hospital, though it took two tries before they seemed to click. I thought that their senses of humor were well-matched.
Dean was an avid reader who enjoyed computers, watching baseball, and The Ohio State University football team. He also enjoyed movies, trivia and taking cruises with his family. Dean had a great sense humor and was loved by his patients, his family and friends. He was excited and proud about becoming a grandfather in October to Daphne Engelman. He will be missed by all who knew him. He also leaves to cherish his memory, two daughters, Becky and Annie Huffman; two nephews; and many great friends and colleagues.
I first met Dean our first day on campus, when we and our parents bumped into each other in our entryway in Vanderbilt Hall near dinner time. On the spur of the moment, the six of us decided to go to dinner together and so a 50-year friendship began.
As those who knew him the longest know, Dean’s most prominent characteristics perhaps were his love and talent for mathematics and his mischievous sense of humor. Not being a denizen of the ivory tower, he was pleased to share math jokes with his classmates, however little qualified they were to understand them without a little postjoke tutoring. One that still sticks in my mind is one he told when grape-based jokes were a fad: “What’s purple and commutes? An ibelian grape.” He then explained that in mathematics an ibelian group is a set of numbers that has the property of commutation (meaning that equations in such a group were reversible—they worked the same backwards and forwards). (I realized only yesterday that this joke is also a pun—grape, group.) Of course, to be sure you had learned the lesson, he would tell you such jokes on many different occasions.
But Dean’s talent for math and his willingness to share his knowledge and love of it made him a superb teacher. If I had taken freshman calculus from Dean, I am sure that I would have learned much more calculus than I already knew, instead of, as actually happened, having my command of the subject substantially degraded, because Dean had the skill and insight to explain math in ways that everyone can grasp.
For two examples:
He explained what topology is about by posing a concrete and simple question: Is it possible to comb a hairy billiard ball without having a part? If inclined, you could spend many hours contemplating a long-haired billiard ball combed with a part and whether that part could be avoided.
He proved to me that despite what your high school math teacher may have told you, one infinity can be larger than another. Simply imagine there is an infinite number of people each wearing a pair of socks. Obviously, there are twice as many socks as people even though both are infinite in number.
Dean was also a fan of Broadway musicals, especially the Music Man, the score of which he had apparently memorized. I foolishly let Dean know that I did not like musicals. The consequence was that all through sophomore year, he would tease me by singing “76 Trombones” when I dropped by his room.
Dean’s intellect was immense and despite his devotion to math—who else have you met who when a high school student would read advanced math books for fun?—I always believed that he could excel at anything he was in fact interested in. Because of his stratospheric placement in the Putnam Competition senior year, the Harvard Department of Mathematics wrote to Dean offering him a place in its Ph.D. program, including waiver of tuition and a stipend, if he applied for admission. But believing that he was already too old to make any worthy breakthroughs in math, Dean decided to opt for medicine, as we know.
Over the years, not only did Dean become an accomplished physician but he broadened and evolved his interests, becoming interested in, among other things, public policy and politics, and evolving his views on them as his knowledge and experience grew.
After Dean became confined to bed, a couple of times a month or so, we would have telephone conversations and talk about a wide range of topics—politics, world affairs, issues in medicine and other scientific topics, even sports—and one of the plagues of our time, unwanted telephone solicitations. Unlike most people, Dean came to welcome robocalls. He delighted in turning the tables on the callers, challenging everything they said and observing how they struggled to keep to their scripts in the face of his relentless pushing back. He believed that wasting as much of their time as he could was a public service.
A few months ago, I told him how some companies now used artificial intelligence programs and highly sophisticated voice recognition/artificial speech systems that were nearly impossible to detect to answer customer service calls—and that one cannot get such a program to admit that its dialogue is computer generated. He was fascinated. It wasn’t very long before the robocallers began using these systems to troll for marks. And not long after that, Dean happily called me to say that he was very sure he had just had a ‘conversation’ with one.
The week before his demise, Dean called me to gleefully recount his greatest triumph in his personal war against telephone solicitors. Part of Dean’s campaign to harass robocallers was to ask them to hold while he looked for some bit of information they had requested and them simply leave them hanging until he heard the howler tone indicating the caller had finally hung up. On this occasion, the caller, obviously from Bangalore or some similar location, offered to transfer Dean’s credit card balances so as to save him money. Dean said to the caller, “My credit card’s downstairs. Can you wait while I go get it?” The scammer agreed, so Dean put the receiver down on the bed to wait for the howler. Fifteen minutes later, there was still no indication that the caller had hung up, so Dean picked up the phone and told him that he couldn’t find his credit card. Could he call him back after he found it? The called said, that’s alright, I will call you back in a few minutes. A minute or two later, the phone rang and it was Dean’s new acquaintance, who was irate. He said, “When you find your credit card, you can roll it up into a tube and stuff it up [a certain bodily orifice].” He then called Dean an M.F. and hung up. Dean thought that for an (South Asian) Indian, the fellow showed good command of urban American profanity.
To the end, Dean never lost his wit and clarity.
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