Gilbert Hunt Jr., 92; Math and Tennis Ace

[PyrateJohn]

Gilbert Hunt Jr., 92; Math and Tennis Ace


By Joe Holley, Washington Post Staff Writer


Gilbert Hunt Jr., 92, an improbably good tennis player as a young man
growing up in the District [Washingotn DC] and one of the world's
foremost authorities on probability theory and analysis as a
mathematics professor at Princeton University, died May 30 [2008] of
respiratory failure at his home in Princeton, New Jersey.


Probability theory is an area of mathematics that allows for
forecasts
in any complex system, including the weather and quantum mechanics.
The Hunt process, a key mathematical model used in probability
theory,
is named for him.


He is famous among probability theorists for his foundational work on
mathematical models known as Markov processes.


"Such a process models a random system in which knowledge of the past
gives no more information about the future than does knowledge of the
present," said Edward Nelson, a Princeton mathematics professor and
an
expert on probability theory. "Betting on the lottery is a Markov
process. Your chances of winning are not affected by how many times
you have lost in the past."


Years before Dr. Hunt's renown as a math theorist, he won fame as a
tennis prodigy whose eccentricities made it difficult to predict
whether he would win or lose any given match.


At 16 and again at 18, he was ranked No. 1 nationally in junior
indoor
tennis and was rated one of the top 10 national tennis players during
his college years. He talked to himself incessantly, often played
barefoot and sometimes wore a floppy farmer's hat to ward off the
sun.
If he wasn't playing well or if it got too hot, he would simply walk
off the court.


"He is an extraordinarily gifted mathematics scholar and teacher, but
somewhere in his curious makeup is a streak of daffiness that
occasionally prompts him to remove his shoes in the middle of a
match,
and entertain galleries by picking up objects with his toes,"
Washington Post sportswriter Bob Considine observed in a 1939 column.


"This, we might add, is done with a strange faraway look in his
brooding black eyes, and an air of complete detachment," Considine
wrote. "But shoeless or shod, when he is hot, he is the hottest thing
in an otherwise cold and clammy crop of cup defenders."


During the last half of the 1930s, he was "hot" more often than not.
In a 1938 match at Forest Hills, New York, against Bobby Riggs, the
nation's second-ranking men's player, Dr. Hunt scored a stunning
upset. Riggs, known to a later generation for his match against
Billie
Jean King, was a 10-1 favorite, "but the frail Washington [DC]
mathematician constantly out-maneuvered and pressed the husky Chicago
[Illinois] 'play boy,' " The Post reported.


(Years later, Dr. Hunt recounted to family members how he got more
oomph into his power serves in the Riggs match by hollowing out his
wooden racket and filling it with lead.)


On a July day in 1939, The Post reported, "Giddy Gilbert Hunt, George
Washington University's mathematical wizard and eccentric
extraordinary, forgot his cute capers long enough to come up with one
of his great local tennis performances and whip Byran (Bitsy) Grant
in
an exhibition on Rock Creek courts."


Grant, a world-ranked player at the time, was so impressed with his
young opponent's play that at one point he put down his racket and
joined the 1,200 spectators in applause.


Gilbert Agnew Hunt Jr. was born in the District to Gilbert Hunt, an
engineer and bridge builder, and May Jane Winfield Hunt, a homemaker
who, in the words of The Post in 1934, "is the matron saint of
Gilbert
Hunt's tennis progress."


In 1932, Considine noted that the Eastern High School senior was an
honor student who takes "six majors" and "attacks the harpsichord
armed with something more than a knowledge of chopsticks." He
recalled
that young Mr. Hunt "once took this column to task for printing
poetry
in a scrambled 'didatric hexometer' or some such heinous charge."


He attended MIT from 1934 to 1936 but dropped out to play tennis. He
resumed his studies at George Washington University, where he
received
his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1938.


Drafted into the Army in 1941, he trained as a weather forecaster and
used his mathematical prowess to help develop forecasts for the
Allied
invasion of Normandy on D-Day.


From 1946 to 1949, Capt. Hunt served as an attache to the computing
pioneer John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton and received his doctorate from Princeton in 1948. He
taught
briefly at Cornell University and, from 1966 to 1968, was mathematics
department chairman at Princeton, where he taught until he retired in
1986.


Dr. Hunt developed macular degeneration in the 1960s and began losing
his sight at the height of his career. Colleagues said he developed
methods to think about math in a new way as it became more difficult
for him to read equations.


His marriages to Mary Hunt and Helen Hunt ended in divorce.


Survivors include two children from his first marriage, Laurence Hunt
and Margaret Hunt, both of Princeton; four children from his second
marriage, Diana Hunt of Hamburg, Germany, Christopher Hunt of Boston
[Massacnusetts], Lisa Hunt of Berkeley, California, and Gregory Hunt
of Griggstown, New Jersey; and two grandchildren.


"The great love of his life was tennis," Margaret Hunt said.


Lisa Hunt said that in later years, long after her father had quit
playing, long after he had lost his sight, he liked to recall match
strategies and the precise mathematical angles that helped make him,
in all probability, the best tennis-playing mathematician Washington
[DC] has ever produced.