Fred

[Robert Pare <R.Pare@Dal.Ca>=0A=]

Fred was a great guy and I liked him. His love of language was manifest
in his writing as well as in his oral communication. It was from his papers  that I
learned the words “behoove” and “antepenultimate”. In one paper he explained,
in a precise and understandable way, the theory of triples (aka monads), their
algebras and how they relate to adjoints, … all in a single sentence!

I first met him when I was a graduate student at McGill in 1968. He was sleeping
on the couch in the lounge with a sign on his chest saying “Wake me at 2:30”.
Someone asked, “Who’s this?”. The reply: “The colloquium speaker.” He spoke
(at 2:35) on enriched theories and algebras. One thing he said has stuck with me.
The base category was a non-symmetric monoidal category and the algebras were
contravariant functors into it (if my memory serves me correctly). He said there
may come a time when we have to consider covariant functors as contravariant
ones on the opposite category.

He was a true original and a great loss to our community.


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