Thursday night – my old friend Val

Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching one of my old friends give a talk at Beta… I met Val Kagan back in 1992. My friend Paul introduced us because Val Was an amazing jazz pianist… He was that so much more. Val came to this country is part of a Jewish resettlement program for Russian scientist. Val and his family had been living and teaching in Novosibirsk in Siberia USSR. He came to this country not speaking a whole lot of English. He started working at hazelett Strip casting as a technician… He retired from there as their chief scientist. He’s the most rigorous engineer I’ve ever met. He starts everything for mathematical theory. I wants helped him a little to get a chance to teach at the University of Vermont… He was teaching a class on mathematical modeling. I found out that he had written six books on the mathematics of MecaTronics design.

I just recently reconnected with Val after more than 15 years. We lost touch after sam died. val whose 85 has had an interesting history. his wife Tatiana died about five years ago… I’ll always remember her for the hot pepper and garlic vodka that she would make your drink as medicine. I remember the worst hangover of my life was on that stuff.

val and I got reconnected in a funny way… I was talking to our CEO and my friend Kyle about an amazing demo that I had once seen Val give of a magneto hydrodynamic braking system for liquid metal. Kyle it turns out was a huge fan and former business partner of ours… They have a very deep mutual admiration. Val has said that ‘Kyle was his favorite student ever

val’s talk was an interesting mixed bag. He had a lot of philosophy and some math… And his main point was that he had come up with an interesting way of reconciling Maxwell’s equations and the lorentz force. He showed us an incredible demo of the ideas involving a rotating magnetic desk separated by a small gap from a rotating copper Disk. If you turn the magnetic disc the copper one rotated if you turn the two in opposite directions it produced a small negative current if you taped the two discs together and turn them it created a small positive or negative current depending on direction… It blew my mind… Nothing in Maxwell’s equations alone with predict that.

I’m still scratching my head.

It was such an honor to see him again… I’m looking forward to seeing him more often now

nite all, nite sam

-jc

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *