Frank Wang
My name is Frank Wang. I first met Mr. Day on August 6, 1993, my very first day in the United States. It was a stormy night at JFK airport, and it was an occasion that I will never forget. I’m a friend of Kristen’s, whom I met six years earlier in Taiwan. When I got accepted by Columbia University’s Physics PhD program in spring of 1993, Mr. and Mrs. Day insisted that they help me settle in New York. (Kris was in Hong Kong at the time.) I spent my first few weeks in a new country with the Days in Greenwich, CT before the fall semester started, and during this period I developed my admiration of this remarkable man.
Mr. Day was proud of the energy efficiency of his Greenwich house, which he poured his intellectual effort to design. As a theoretical physics student, I was amazed by how he put thermodynamics into practical use. I recalled that Mr. and Mrs. Day helped me open my bank account in White Plains, NY. Mr. Day was extraordinarily cautious in reading the fine print of the contract: How is the balance defined? How frequent is the interest compounded? Etc. Decades later, now that I became a professor at LaGuardia Community College, which is part of the City University of New York, I always incorporate financial literacy into my teaching, so that students are not susceptible to dubious practices of big financial institutions. (As a matter of fact I was instructing such a topic on April 4, the day of Mr. Day’s passing.) I traced my teaching philosophy to Mr. Day’s wisdom, which I believe have benefited many students in an urban public university setting who tend to be less privileged.
Mr. Day was a world traveler. I enjoyed hearing his adventures, and I was lucky to have the opportunities to spend some time with him on different parts of the planet. In 2016, I spent several days with Mr. and Mrs. Day in Florence, Italy. It was magical to see Arno River and the sunset while sharing our travel experiences. When Mr. Day saw a picture taken in Deutsches Museum, he instantly recognized the type of capacitor used in their electric show. He went on to talk about the property of liquid helium and superconductivity. His knowledge of science and his intellectual curiosity is just amazing.
I last saw Mr. Day in January 2019, after his surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He remained optimistic and retained his characteristic sense of humor. I remember one of his jokes when he was sitting in his car in New York a few years ago. He was listening to classical music on WQXR while waiting for street cleaning. He said “they just played Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, in its entirety.”