A Quest for Understanding To William “Bus” Jaco, math is more than his lifelong career. It’s fun. Ever since he can remember, the OSU Regents Professor has been obsessed with math problems. In fact, when he was a kid growing up in a small West Virginia railroad town, he taught himself how to add. “I don’t subtract like other people do,” says Jaco, seated in his office with a large computation-smeared wipe board hanging next to him. “I add digits to the smaller number to get the correct answer instead of borrowing digits from the larger number. Others are confused when I do this in front of them.” He has his own Wikipedia page, which says Jaco works on three-manifolds and is a co-discoverer of the JSJ Decomposition, named for its discoverers, Jaco, Peter Shalen and German mathematician Klaus Johannsen. To explain, Jaco clears off a portion of his board and patiently describes his work during the 41 years since receiving a doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin. “My career has been simply to understand these three-dimensional objects and how they behave,” says Jaco, who came to OSU in 1982 as math department head after teaching for 13 years at Rice. “Think of a two sphere — the boundary of a ball. If you stand in one spot of it, it looks like a plane, but the two sphere is globally different from the plane. Mathematicians have classified all possible objects that are like the plane locally but differ globally. My work is the study and understanding of all objects that locally look like three-dimensional space but globally are different.” Jaco grew up in a family of railroad workers and coal miners from Grafton, W.Va. After high school in 1958, he worked as a mechanic, tinkered with his ’56 Chevy V-8 drag racer and did math problems. “I never knew that people did mathematics, never knew they did research in universities. I remember as an auto mechanic, I’d work on geometry problems during lunch. Then, I’d take them over to my high school teacher. He told me he didn’t think I was doing all these problems, that somebody must’ve been helping me,” Jaco says. “I decided to go to college and take his job.” He went to Fairmont State, a nearby teacher’s college, where a math instructor encouraged him to continue. He earned a master’s degree in mathematics at Penn State while working in a Navy underwater acoustics laboratory before going to Wisconsin for his doctoral degree. “I never thought about what I was doing,” Jaco says. “I just loved doing it. I never thought what my life was going to be like. I just went along doing mathematics all the time.” After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, he took a job at Rice and has since studied at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, Calif., California Institute of Technology and the University of Melbourne, among others. He left OSU from 1988 to 1995 to lead the American Mathematical Society in Providence, R.I., an international mathematics society that reviews about 60,000 papers per year. An endowed chair at OSU lured him back in 1995. He sees his future work continuing to push his understanding of how objects exist in three-dimensional spaces. Some of his theoretical work has shown promise for DNA studies and protein folding theory — an effort to understand how proteins form before carrying out their functions. However, Jaco eschews application and prefers the pure realm of theoretical work. “There’s an old story of Euclid. One of his students asked him, ‘What’s this good for?’ He called his servant over and said ‘give him some coins if he has to have remunerations for what he’s doing.’” Matt Elliott Photo by Phil Shockley Regent’s Professor College of Arts and Sciences 22 faculty News
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