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      I was recently doing a small mathematical calculation, related to the spread of COVID, when my mind wandered to a course I took in mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology nearly fifty years ago. We used a textbook written by a Caltech professor named Jon Mathews, who was thirty-nine years old at the time. I became friends with Jon through our shared love of sailing. Only a handful of years later, Jon and his wife were lost at sea while crossing the Indian Ocean in Jon’s 34-foot sailboat, in an accident he could have avoided.

       Such an unkempt catastrophe I’ve never been able to fasten to my memories of Jon, who was as meticulous in his scrubbed, crew-cut appearance as he was in his tidy mathematical calculations, and who had always seemed, at least to us students, to always look twice before he leaped. Perhaps it was exactly his cautious and buttoned-down style that denied Mathews any truly outstanding contributions to his subject, theoretical physics. Caltech was then, and still is, chock full with Nobel Prize winners and thus a tough benchmark. Jon was certainly a very good physicist, but not in those ranks. Something was missing, some additional ability or imagination or daring. In a paper he is remembered for, “Gravitational Radiation from Point Masses in a Keplerian Orbit,” Mathews begins: “One might expect masses in arbitrary motion to radiate gravitational energy. The question has been raised, however, whether the energy so calculated has any physical meaning. We shall not concern ourselves with this question here  . . . ” Professor Mathews then goes on to do a textbook calculation of the conjectured effect.

         In fact, Mathews was a superb teacher. At the blackboard, he was in his element, distilling the physical world into beautiful chalked equations running on for many feet, explaining each concept in mechanics or electromagnetism so clearly that you could begin to see an equation on the blackboard wiggle back and forth like the pendulums or springs it described. Jon was such a good teacher that some of us audited his courses without credit, forcing a space in our frantic graduate studies to hear a familiar subject discussed with elegance and precision.

         After Jon and I discovered our mutual passion for sailing, I became one of the students he recruited to serve as crew for weekend jaunts on his boat, the Drambuie II. He sometimes told me about his dream of one day sailing around the world.

         A cruise I still remember was to Catalina Island, about 30 miles off the coast of Long Beach. Jon’s wife Jean wasn’t along, but one of his children was. Going out, we had a stiff and shifty breeze. Jon hustled around the boat with surprising agility, cranking winches, reefing the main, resetting pulleys, and generally in complete control, as calm as if he were solving a straightforward boundary value problem at the blackboard. His boat was, of course, immaculately kept, its brass hardware gleaming and in good repair, lines religiously coiled when not in use, and every item in its proper place – a rare state of affairs for sailboats. That night, at anchor off the island, with the boat gently rocking on her anchor and us cozy in the cave-lit cabin within, Jon unwrapped his most recent toy to show me, a sextant, his voice pitched high as always when we was explaining something new. We never talked physics on board.

         A famous scientist once likened much of scientific research to craftsmanship, in which most scientists are happy to spend their lives in collaborative efforts, where being reliable is more important than being original. That kind of science, even done well, was not enough for Jon. He pursued one hobby after another to fulfill himself, including not only sailing but an unexpected mastery of the Eastern languages Urdu and Hindi, revealed one day in his orderly office when he pulled down from the bookshelf a volume in Sanskrit and began reading to me.

         This was all fifty years ago. Little by little, Mathews garnered the necessary expertise, the many practice cruises, and the navigational knowledge to realize his dream of sailing around the world. On his 1979-1980 sabbatical, he set sail from Los Angeles in early summer, heading west. The last reported radio contact with him was on December 24, 1979, several hundred miles from Mauritius. A friend was waiting in South Africa for his arrival, which never occurred. Mathews and his wife Jean had sailed into the path of an Indian Ocean cyclone, a counterpart of hurricanes in the Caribbean or typhoons in the China Sea. This one was named Cyclone Claudette. The peak season for such storms in the Indian Ocean begins in December. Mathews had planned his trip so that the crossing would take place well before. However, according to reports I read at the time, Jon was already behind schedule before reaching Australia and, rather than turn back or remain berthed for an additional six months while waiting for the storm season to pass, he decided to risk the crossing. No trace of the Drambuie or its occupants was ever found.

         Over the years, I’ve tried to recreate what must have been happening in Jon’s mind as he pondered charts, timetables, and weather reports in Perth and then decided to take the biggest gamble of his life. Perhaps he had something to prove to himself. Perhaps there was always in him a hidden impatience with life, some dissatisfaction. Or perhaps he did not want to appear to his friends that he had given up on a goal he had long talked about. I remain baffled. And I remain haunted. I picture him as the storm first hit, suddenly finding himself out of control in a vast, raging place he’d never imagined, a chasm without solution. Jon’s brilliant lectures in the classroom, his beautifully scripted Urdu, our fellowship within the watertight world of neatly stacked journals and equations – all pale beside that final image.