Bernard Dwork 1923--1998

Bernard Morris Dwork, “Bernie” to those who had the privilege of knowing him, died on May 9, 1998, just weeks short of his seventyfifth birthday. He is survived by his wife of fifty years, Shirley; his three children, Andrew, Deborah, and Cynthia; his four granddaughters; his brothers Julius and Leo; and his sister, Elaine Chanley. We mention family early in this article, both because it was such a fundamental anchor of Bernie’s life and because so many of his mathematical associates found themselves to be part of Bernie’s extended family. The authors of this article, although not family by blood, felt themselves to be son and older brother to him. Bernie was perhaps the world’s greatest p-adic analyst. His proof of the rationality of the zeta function of varieties over finite fields, for which he was awarded the AMS Cole Prize in Number Theory, is one of the most unexpected combinations of ideas we know of. In this article we will try to describe that proof and sketch Bernie’s other main contributions to mathematics. But let us start at the beginning. Bernie was born on May 27, 1923, in the Bronx. In 1943 he graduated from the City College of New York with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He served in the United States Army from March 30, 1944, to April 14, 1946. After eight months of training as repeaterman at the Central Signal Corps School, he served in the Asiatic Pacific campaign with the Headquarters Army Service Command. He was stationed in Seoul, Korea, which, according to reliable sources, he once deprived of electricity for twenty-four hours by “getting his wires crossed”. This is among the first of many “Bernie stories”, some of which are so well known that they are referred to with warm affection in shorthand or code. For instance, “Wrong Plane” refers to the time Bernie put his ninety-year-old mother on the wrong airplane. “Wrong Year” refers to the time Bernie was prevented from flying to Bombay in January 1967 by the fact that his last-minute request for a visa to attend a conference at the Tata Institute was denied on the grounds that the conference was to be held the following year, in 1968.