Chancellor Charles L. Isbell, Jr. in his office. Photo by Michelle Hassel.
Office space
Every object in Chancellor Charles L. Isbell, Jr.’s office tells the story of how he sees himself as a scientist, teacher, mentor, lifelong learner, and steward of the university.
Contributors
Interviewed by Abigail Bobrow
Photographs by Michelle Hassel
As Chancellor Charles L. Isbell, Jr. moves around his office in the Swanlund Administration Building, he gladly shares the stories behind the framed pieces on the walls and the objects on his desk, speaking with the eagerness of a knowledgeable docent. Chicago blues hums from his speakers in the background.
To him, the office is more than a workspace. It is a visual autobiography, a place where research, mentorship, history, family, hobbies, and leadership converge into a single idea: Every person is part of a much longer story, with ancestors to honor and descendants to inspire.
“This is my past. This is my present. And then, in front of you, is the future,” Chancellor Isbell said, gesturing throughout the room. “All are part of the story.”
Chancellor Isbell’s responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Honoring the past
These are all my academic ancestors. I’m at the bottom, with my two advisers. Above them are their advisers, then their advisers, and so on, all the way back to the 1300s. It’s my entire academic ancestry, as documented by the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Looking at it reminds me that I didn’t get here on my own.
Mapping the present
This is one of my research posters from a project studying social interaction in virtual environments. About a thousand people are represented as nodes, with each edge showing communication between them. The colors indicate different communication patterns, and we used machine learning to group people who communicated in similar ways. The arrows show the direction of those interactions. If you look at the 10 or 11 people everyone talks to, you’ll notice they all talk to one another, too. It’s a little like high school. The figure at the center is me and my robot in that virtual world. For me, the poster represents the present, a reminder of the kinds of questions I’m drawn to and the complex systems I love trying to understand.
Empowering the future
These are all the students who earned PhDs under my supervision. My research group is called P-Funk, an acronym for “probabilistic functional knowledge,” but it’s also a nod to [the music collective] Parliament-Funkadelic because I’m really into music. It was our tradition that whenever one of my students defended and was ready to graduate, they would wear the hat and the glasses and pick a pair of fuzzy dice — because P-Funk is probabilistic, it had to be random, and nothing is funkier and more random than fuzzy dice. They leave the hat and the glasses with me, but they take the fuzzy dice with them wherever they go.
Drawing inspiration
A friend of mine gave me this image of Benjamin Sisko when I left Georgia Tech. Sisko is my favorite Star Trek captain from the series “Deep Space Nine.” I liked him because he was a very cerebral captain, not just one of those who went out blowing things up like Kirk. I appreciated the way Sisko did things. He also looks a little like an idealized version of me. I’ll take that.
Inspiring tradition
When I got tenure, my students broke into my office overnight, remodeled it, and turned it into a disco lounge. They hung curtains, covered everything in pink cellophane, brought in a lava lamp, and gave me this hat and these glasses.
Exploring other worlds
Alex Ross is one of the greatest comic-book artists ever, and this piece is from “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” one of my favorite comic-book stories about the DC multiverse collapsing into a single universe. I’ve always loved comics — as of today, I have over 23,077 of them — and Alex Ross can paint superheroes so they look almost real. His work has an incredible sense of scale and emotion. I just think he’s amazing.
Enduring childhood
This lightsaber was a gift from one of my students. I’ve been reading science fiction for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I went to the library every week, especially during the summer. I’d return 10 books and check out 10 more — lots of Robert A. Heinlein in those days. I’d also spend hours in the library reading reference books that couldn’t be checked out. Then I’d go home and devour everything I’d borrowed, often reading my favorite books more than once.
