The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 106

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Barbara Keyfitz
to engage the services of a series of talented and wise Deputy
Directors, and a revolving group of consultants in its boards
and scientific committees, who have contributed immeasurably
to its development.
An Honour and a Privilege
From July 1, 2004 until December 31, 2009, I had the honour
and privilege of being the Director of the Fields Institute.
During those four-and-a-half years, my life was absorbed into
the life of Fields: I moved to Toronto (after an absence of 38
years) and spent most of my waking hours in my elegant office
on the second floor, at the southeast corner of the building.
But in fact, my relationship with the Institute goes much
farther back to the winter and spring of 1993 when, along with
my family, I spent a semester at the first location of Fields—in
rented space at the University of Waterloo, in a serviceable
but much less elegant office. That was the first year of
operation of the Institute; leadership was shared between Jerry
Marsden (who was based in California but made extensive
visits), John Chadam (who was in transit from McMaster
to the University of Pittsburgh), and Bill Shadwick (who
was, I recall, technically the Deputy Director). The program
centred on a dynamical systems approach to partial differential
equations. Depending on your viewpoint, it was dynamical
systems in infinite dimensional spaces or partial differential
equations where you had to explain to outsiders what people
in PDE really did.
As someone who held the second viewpoint, I behaved
in, what I can now see from the perspective of a Director,
was a totally irresponsible way. The Institute had also
sponsored my postdoc, Sunny Canic, taking over her salary
from the University of Houston (which generously continued
to pay most of my salary—an arrangement which Fields has