Thread by @robertghrist

henry wente: geometer & teacher.
he left this world today: 20-jan-2020.
he's the reason i'm a mathematician.

i was an engineering undergraduate at the university of toledo, ohio, in 1987. i had AP calculus in high school, but there was an "honors calculus 1 for engineers" course, so i signed up for that. the teacher was *so* *weird*.
his name was dr. wente.

he was socially awkward in that clearly-brilliant way.
we just all thought he was weird.
then, one day, there was an announcement for a research talk in the math department that had a funny picture:
(image credit math.uni-tuebingen.de/user/nick/gall…)

we engineering students were agog: the picture was labelled a "wente torus".
we couldn't figure out why somebody would name something after our weird calc prof.

we asked him about it -- to distract from class, of course.
he muttered something about curvature blah^3.
he was so earnest and shy about it.
like he was talking about love.
he was talking about a torus.

eventually, i learned about the "wente tori" -- the counterexamples to conjecture of h. hopf on constant-mean-curvature surfaces that had remained open for so long. the original "wente torus" -- a CMC torus -- came as a surprise.

henry wente worked on this tirelessly while he was a tenure-track professor at tufts (iirc). he was turned down for tenure. thankfully, the university of toledo gave him a position. he stayed at toledo for the rest of his career.

it took time, but i stopped thinking of him as a comic calc prof, and started getting to know him. he was an amazing teacher & i learned so much from him.
so, i took more classes from him.
i took 12 classes from him.
anything i could get.

henry wente was the first person who taught me that mathematicians do research -- that there's more to discover -- that even when the rest of the world says a thing shouldn't exist, it may yet be found.

i never thought about being a mathematician -- even the idea of going to graduate school was not part of my culture growing up. but henry wente more than anyone taught me that there's this vast unknown world of crazy objects that we can just barely imagine with enough effort.

& now he's gone.

i've been so lucky to have the chance to pay it forward by teaching lots of engineering students calculus.
(& not minding being thought of as weird)

i've been so lucky to have a job where i can find new things too, sometimes.

farewell dr. wente.
god bless you.
thank you for who you were & all you did.