The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 30

8
W.F. Shadwick
was Peter Nicholson.
An Institute Needs a Board of Directors
By this time (probably late 1988 or early 1989), John Chadam
had become my aide-de-camp. We went to Toronto one day
to meet Peter Nicholson, then working as a special advisor to
Cedric Richie at the Bank of Nova Scotia. We left that meeting
(and a good lunch Peter Nicholson treated us to) convinced
that we had found the first Chairman of the Board of Directors
of the Institute.
Jerry Marsden’s extraordinary energy on the scientific side
was matched by Peter Nicholson’s advice on the c ampaign.
Over the next few years on the daily commute between
Burlington and Waterloo, I almost always spoke with Peter
on the car phone before 8 a.m. on the way in and with Jerry
in the evening on the way home. John was also involved on a
more or less daily basis.
Brick Wall?
By the beginning of the 1989–90 academic year, there was still
no sign of a second round of Ontario’s Centres of Excellence
and to make matters worse, Cornell’s Mathematics Research
Center was looking for a new director and had been courting
Jerry. By March 1990, the prospects for the Fields Institute,
in spite of the now quite apparent benefits it would bring,
appeared hopeless.
Vic Snaith, who had been serving as the Chairman of the
Fields Institute Committee, and I went to Ottawa to make
an invited presentation to the House of Commons Standing
Committee on Science and Technology. I cannot recall what
generated this invitation but I suspect that Peter had a hand in
it. We told them about the Fields Institute and our conclusion
that there was apparently no means of funding it.