Birth date: Jun 20, 1935 Death date: Jan 13, 2023
Services will be held February 25th, 11 am to 2pm at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland. Roger Purves’s singular heart failed while on a walk near his Berkeley home on Friday, January 13th, 2023. He had been ill for 3 years with compl Read Obituary
Ross Fraser asked me to send this message on his behalf:
My typing ability is quite limited. But very happy memories of summer fetes in Lantzville on the beach.
All those writers you introduced me to years ago, Roger. And all those wide ranging conversations. And that's only the tip of the iceberg of what I remember of you and admire you for.
So many happy memories of Uncle Roger playing games and making me laugh when I was visiting, or staying after summer camp. Deepest Condolences, Ivana
I first met Roger and Caroline in London in the mid 60’s. Face to face contact has of course been intermittent since then but I came to admire Roger more than he ever knew. Knowledgable, perceptive, curious, willing to listen. An unforgettable smile and so much more!
For Roger:
I always called Roger when I felt I needed an anchor to which I could fix my thoughts about what is going on in the new news, not mathematics or probability, but music, literature, computers, AI, politics, people, and whatever else influenced us in the outer world. And I usually called him after major holidays as soon as I had collected enough to discuss and keep him interested and flowing, as I always wanted his perspective. I didn’t call him right after January 1 this year, but thought to wait a bit until the turbulence of the starting year subsided, and I was just getting ready to call him when Caroline sent me the sad news, in the wistful, melancholy way of our world.
I first met Roger when I’d returned from five years in Europe to start grad school. Somehow we immediately connected on things other than math and probability and statistics, all of whose technicalities quickly faded to just a minor subset of our conversations, which I looked forward to with pleasure and always enjoyed enormously, and which became essential to my understanding of the world. He was one of the members of my PhD dissertation committee in 1969, and later we became co-authors, but my family and friends know that he was much more than either of those. He was a generous friend and an essential cohort for me in the affairs of a world that has undergone such changes since we first met.
Roger was for me, and surely for many others, something of a polymath, not of mathematics and such, but of all the interesting things that are going on in our universe of experience, and his conversations were delightful to me, as they could stray off into unanticipated directions that I would never have expected. That was Roger’s genius, a mind that ranged far beyond mine, bringing me to unanticipated entertainments and insights. I always looked forward to my next conversation with Roger, ranging from thought to thought about all our many shared interests, conversations now forever lost to my world except for the good memories and the sadness of never again. He would surely laugh at my fervent hope that there is indeed another side, and that we would someday meet there and be able to continue our conversations. I miss him dearly already, wish I could call and talk to him about all of this right now.
Bob Pisani
I've known Roger for at least 50 years. I met Roger and Caroline through our common membership in a group of friends, graduate students, young faculty, etc. in the 60s. After that I frequently socialized with Roger and Caroline as a couple, plus often ran into Roger in cafes around the University, where we would fall into the shifting, unpredictable, energizing conversations that Roger always seemed to invite. Roger was the genial, observant outsider to my generation of shape-shifting types. Even after I turned into a steadier, more conventional member of society, Roger managed to bring out my eccentric side and provoke the sort of rather reckless, eccentric coversations and affectionate debates that make talking worthwhile. After he retired we managed to keep meeting for lunch, and talking, and debating, and laughing. His smile. Roger was unique. Roger towered over littleness and pettiness. I loved the man, and treasure his memory.
Ken Davids
I met Roger, together with Caroline, Conan and Miranda — all at once, through my uncle Mike and aunt Carol (below) when the Purves family was living in Lantzville, shortly before Conan turned up at my high school in Victoria. Roger made a big impression on me at the time, in three ways.
First, he probed gently but persistently — another kid’s dad asking questions of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, hardly a recipe for scintillating repartee, let alone full disclosure. But, as previously noted, Roger applied genuine curiosity, sustained by visible attention, and he persisted until he got you talking freely. It seems plausible, if not likely, that answering Roger’s questions could indeed make one seem more interesting than usual, even to oneself.
Second, the way he presided over the chaos of an extravagantly creative family — variously calling each other out, cooking, acting characters in comic books, or practicing calisthenics at the dinner table — his unflappable calm and satisfied demeanour was remarkable. Maybe it was academic remove, or an anthropological approach. Or maybe he wasn’t wholly aware of his circumstances. Whichever the case, Roger made for a study in philosophy.
And that was the third thing. The philosophy. His philosophical sensibility, his interest in the fundamental nature of YOUR knowledge, YOUR reality, YOUR existence. This is what I believe was behind all that curiosity — Roger was constantly comparing philosophical viewpoints with the people he met — whether, like me then, they were twelve or, like me again later, forty-two. It’s an admirable trait, and one I’m pleased to see he passed on to my friend Conan. Thinking about Roger now, recalling long-ago exchanges with him as vividly as I remember much more recent ones, I realize too, how rare it must be.
Ken Dobell
I've been friends with Roger's children since I was very young, and I have many fond memories of visits to their home on Vancouver Island. We were often quite raucous, I think - listening to music and scream-laughing the way teenagers do. Roger seemed unfazed by the noise. He was always smiling and laughing along with us, and seemed genuinely pleased that we were having fun.
He was never dismissive, and would engage in conversations as if the opinions of a slouchy teenager like me were as legitimate as anyone else's. That's what I'll always remember about him - his wit, his keen sense of humour, his easy-going style. His openness and optimism.
My thoughts are with Caroline, Conan and Miranda, and their families.
I met Roger in 1967 (68?) when he approached me after I had give a far too technical talk to the Berkeley stat department. Not long after we began work on a problem that proved to be very hard for us. We would meet for a week or more every year and gorge ourselves on coffee, mathematics, and wide-ranging conversation. (I learned many things from Roger including words like "peckish" and "velleity.") At the height of the cold war, Roger would joke that we had to keep our notes safe from the communists. Our problem became famous as "Big Vee" in the Purves household where even young Conan and Miranda knew it by name.
Once Roger made the mistake of coming for a visit to Minneapolis
in December. Even though he was equipped with a Minnesota parka, gloves, and scarf, he was unprepared for the below zero temperature on our walk to campus and kept asking if we should stop somewhere and go inside. We made it safely to our destination and got a ride back home.
With the help of Lester Dubins and Ashok Maitra we finally solved our problem about twenty years after we started. I feel lucky that it took so long and gave me an excuse to spend time with my wonderful friend Roger.
Bill Sudderth
One memory of my father-in-law was a recent one -- on New Year’s Eve -- when I was preparing dinner (a rare occurrence in the Purves household, but it was only dumpling filling, as my plan was to utilize the manual labor of family members to make 150 dumplings to ring in 2023).
Roger was at his usual spot at the kitchen table, either reading the newspaper, writing obscure notes and/or perusing his iPad. I like to listen to music when I’m cooking, and he’s enjoyed eclectic music I’ve played in the past, so I put on some very subdued, minimalist German electronic music on my bluetooth speaker, as I didn’t want to disturb Roger too much with pulsating beats.
About 45 minutes later, I asked him how he liked the music. After a short pause, Roger drily replied, “I thought it was rather sepulchral.”
I LOL’d at that, and he obviously enjoyed the fact that I found his response humorous. Then I decided to play something more upbeat, an album by a young Canadian Columbian artist, Lido Pimienta. She has a clear, lovely voice and I find her fusion of synth beats and Afro-Columbian/Indigenous styles quite infectious. Roger clearly felt the same way and asked me all kinds of questions about her music.
As Carol Matthews observed, curiosity was a defining trait of Roger, as well as his love of all kinds of great music, familiar and new. I wish I could've shared more music with him, and I’ll really miss having conversations like these with him.
