Remembering Mathematician Marguerite Frank (1927-2024)

Many knew Marguerite Frank as the wife of Stanford Prof. Joseph Frank, the lauded biographer of Fyodor Dostoevsky. But she was also a powerhouse in the world of mathematics.

In Toronto, 1940s

Marguerite Frank died last month, on December 11, after long illness. Her daughters Claudine and Isabel Frank celebrated a “Guiguite-get-together” last week in Palo Alto. Claudine shared a few words about her mother, a generous, wise, and witty presence on the Stanford campus:

The caregivers we hired for my mother, some of whom are here tonight [. . .] were amazingly devoted and kind to her. In many ways, they were like the wonderful nanny Nana from the Morvan, who cared for her when she was a child. What my mother told me suggests that Nana – much more than her own mother Paula or “Paulette” (in Paris) – gave her the love and attention she craved. During certain holidays she would stay on Nana’s farm in the Morvan, this poorest region of France – which rises from granite – attending the weekend parties of the morvandiaux farmers or shepherds.

These were joyous gatherings with accordions, dancing, and raunchy songs that she recalled for me just last spring. My sister and I were lucky to spend one Easter vacation with Nana in the 1970s. No dances or bourrées. But I still recall leaches in glass jars suctioning the back of her son Jean-Baptiste to extract whatever ailed him; I recall the rabbit, skinned and bleeding, hanging from a hook outside the front door that I was somehow happy to eat that evening; and I loved the wild violets and rivulets nearby. This was her world. I think my sister and I underestimated its importance because my mother’s subsequent hay fever would prevent us from visiting such regions of La France profonde as a family.

In those prewar years, before being uprooted to Canada, she also spent summers in Austria where her grandmother still inhabited a magnificent Viennese apartment right next to a central park. Summering by the Austrian lakes, my mother was amazed by shuhlplattler dancing where the men literally slapped each other. But she was not fluent in German – unlike her parents, both of whom were native German speakers. She had an incredibly strong French accent when speaking to me in that language. At home her parents always spoke French. And in Austria, she was flanked by her elder sister Doris and Nana who for her part, though, picked up so much German that during the War she was employed by the Nazis in the Morvan – and could keep the Resistance maquisards in the loop. My mother never really spoke about the War. But she did recall being terrified of military music and marches: diving under her bed whenever they passed by.

Many of you may know that a few years after emigrating with her family to Toronto in 1939, she entered the Harvard graduate mathematics department.. But I was relieved to hear her tell the following story about her early schooling, which showed that this wunderkind wasn’t simply a driven overachiever. In her Montessori school, when she was five or six, she loved to spend the whole day sitting by the window, daydreaming and looking out at the garden. But one day Grandmaman read her the riot act and told her to start playing with her wooden beads. And thus, a mathematician was born.

About this same school, Maman also told me rather proudly that her young colleagues had dubbed her “moustique” [mosquito] -- because of her stinging remarks. Some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about.

Long before I ever studied French sociability, Maman explained to me in universal terms (but clearly thinking of France) that men prefer women who do not simply smile and flatter them but who instead defy, contradict and challenge them. Of course, when Isabelle and I were growing up, we ourselves had discovered the French aristocratic tradition of vannes. I think we desperately tried to practice, to hone brilliantly aimed répliques or ripostes.

That kind of courtly game is really hard to pull off. When Maman would apply such techniques to my husband, they didn’t work very well, as I recall. My own efforts were even less impressive.

As a “moustique,” though, she was also capable of those tenacious, penetrating, but unexpected sallies that lead to breakthroughs. My friend Martin Andler, a mathematician whose parents and mine were close friends in Paris, texted me a few days ago that her Chicago math thesis on “lie algebras” (or an article from it) currently had twenty-two citations: « Un article en maths pures qui est cité ving-deux fois c’est assez rare ! » As many of you know, her Frank-Wolfe theorem work also received a lot of attention when it became a workhorse of computer science. (I know next to nothing about this.)

Guiguite and Joe Frank in Minnapolis, date unknown.

Public recognition, such as it was, came very late in her life, and this took a toll. When Isabelle and I were growing up, she was pursuing research and doing some teaching, but our mother’s indomitable energy was refocused on helping our father. She would later participate in the Dostoevsky project, but when we were kids, she was busy turning the Gauss Seminars that he chaired into a kind of salon, roping in French writers and intellectuals: Yves Bonnefoy, Gaëtan Picon, Pierre Bourdieu, journalist Alain Clément, Tzvetan Todorov, among others.¹ I would help the salonnière prepare smoked oysters and saltine crackers with cream cheese and salmon caviar.

However much she relished these evenings, though, she remained a participant observer. After every lecture (or almost every lecture), Maman would sneer with mathematical contempt: “It was just a lot of synthesis.”

It was probably around then that she started repeating to me: “The most important thing in life is to have an original idea.” Duly noted.

She also loved cats. I think. Because I have no recollection or photograph of her actually petting any cat. But we always had them (in the States) and for this I’m immensely grateful. She would also do fun, girlish stuff with us, like buying discount clothes at Loehmann’s. In Paris, there was a miraculous day when she took us to the soldes at Ungaro and we both acquired gorgeous designer woolen coats. A few years later, the three of us went skiing together in Vermont. It wasn’t all “original ideas.”

In fact, she never really talked about her ideas – as opposed to her opinions. Only when going through her documents two weeks ago did I realize she had unsuccessfully tried to publish an article on the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Ostensibly, she was reworking her published study of transportation theory’s Braess paradox by linking the latter to game theory. I found many drafts of this article, which a major game-theory journal rejected on the grounds that it required more game theory. The weird thing is that she and my husband often mentioned the Prisoner’s Dilemma over dinner. But on those occasions, she would merely scoff at his interest in game theory without ever once letting on that she herself had put so much time and effort into it.

She was a fragile “moustique.” Unrelenting, active, and busy, but always so unsure.... It’s perfect that my father made her move to California, which was his dream. Even though, of course, once in Stanford, she kept insisting that they return to her dream: Paris. She then even bought herself a small apartment there – instead of investing in Palo Alto Real Estate! I’m not sure she realized just how happy she was in Stanford. But happy she was, and increasingly so over the last few years as her mind started to relax and she could return to that peaceful childhood state – windows, daydreams and sun.

Did I mention that she was smart? Her timing was brilliant. She tuned out last October, right before the presidential elections. Good move, mom. I am very relieved that neither of my parents will have to witness what comes next.

Thank you so much for coming! Heaven help us all.

Postscript: A poetry written to remember Marguerite will be published shortly. Meanwhile, I wrote an article in 2010 on Joseph Frank for the Stanford Report. It seems to have disappeared from the Stanford website, “Stanford's Dostoevsky biographer concludes acclaimed series.” Fortunately, phys.org preserved a copy here, for the interested.

Joseph and Marguerite Frank, Christmas in 1986, Paris

1. In Paris, my parents also frequented, among others, a milieu known as the “Samedis” or “Le Groupe” led by physicist Georges Ambrosino, whose relation to Georges Bataille I have explored in my scholarly edition: [Georges Bataille, Georges Ambrosino] L’Expérience à l’épreuve ; correspondence et inédits (1943-1960), Meurcourt, Éditions les Cahiers, 2018. My mother met Ambrosino and his close friend René Chenon, a mathematician, at a seminar of either Gaston Bachelard or Alexandre Koyré in the early 1950s. My parents never met Bataille, nor did they realize that the core members of Ambrosino’s salon had been part of the the essayist’s prewar secret society Acéphale. See my interview : « La Communauté avouée ; Extraits d’un entretien avec René Chenon », Europe, revue littéraire mensuelle (Georges Bataille – Jean-Luc Steinmetz), n° 1121-1122, , septembre-octobre 2022 : 88-98.