AUGUST 2000
PROFESSOR LOVES WHAT HE DOES
By Dana Peck
Special to the Florida State Times
One glance at the papers on Christopher K. W. Tam's desk in his Love Building office, folders stuffed in his bookshelves and materials loaded on the top of his computer suggests a mathematician steeped in his work.
One brief conversation with Tam confirms a man with an endearing sense of humor.
The combination of work immersion and laughter relief has served him well; this year, Tam's FSU colleagues named him the 1999-2000 Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed by faculty for teaching, research and service.
"I feel somewhat lucky, but I feel they did the right
thing," Tam said as he pressed his hands on both cheeks,
bowed his head slightly, and chuckled.
Tam said the award is the highlight of his 30 years at FSU, where
he teaches and uses applied mathematics to study his passion:
aeroacoustics - noise made by airplanes, primarily jet planes.
The trail that led Tam to FSU has been a lengthy one, beginning
with his birth on the island of Macau, off the coast of China.
His family moved to Hong Kong, where Tam, the fifth of nine children,
grew up.
In his late teens, Tam went to Canada and attended McGill University,
not to become an architect, as his father had wanted, but to
study mathematics.
Once he had his undergraduate degree, Tam moved south for what
he calls carefree days as a graduate student at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
At Cal Tech he earned a doctorate in 1966 and was named a research fellow. In 1971, inspired by a grant from the National Science Foundation, he decided to focus on jet acoustics, a subject that has become his life's work.
For postdoctoral study, Tam went to the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology. There, an assistant professor, he married a librarian, Delia (now at Strozier Library), and had two children (now both working in computers in California).
When FSU called with a job offer, Tam said goodbye to shoveling the "white stuff" and MIT's "slave" wages, and hello to family life as a professor in Tallahassee.
Using computers, he and his team of researchers have pioneered
the simulation of jet noise computations.
Tam says he is a bit of a schizophrenic in his work: part of
him works with mathematical theory, while the other part works
with applying math to real-life uses.
"You can't solve problems theoretically," said De Witt Sumners, chairman of the mathematics department and a past recipient of the Lawton Distinguished Professor award. "Dr. Tam's computational methods have been adopted around the world almost every paper now written in jet acoustics cites his contributions."
"I am lucky; People pay me to do what I enjoy doing," says Tam, a teacher and researcher.
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