The following are the words that Nilifour Mackey spoke at the memorial service organized by the Computer Science Department, State University of New York at Buffalo, in the fall of 1998:

“Pat was not just my advisor,
She was an inspiring role model,
a kindred spirit with whom
I could share my love of things
other than mathematics alone —
Bach, books, language, women mystery writers …
And above all, she was a feminist,
of the generation to whom mine owed so much.
In a male-dominated profession,
I felt blessed to have had strong, forthright Pat
as my advisor.

Pat’s most important contribution in [numerical analysis]
was her superb generalization
of a classic algorithm,
for computing e-vals and e-vectors.

Originally proposed in 1857
by the German mathematician Karl Jacobi,
the algorithm was restricted to real symmetric matrices;
it has been rediscovered several times since,
for example, by Von Neumann in 1950s.

In a wonderful 1962 paper,
Pat generalized Jacobi’s algorithm
to arbitrary complex matrices.

At a conference in 1993 (I was still a grad student)
Pete Stewart, a numerical analyst whom many of us held in awe
said to me, ‘Don’t you know
that the J in PJ Eberlein stands for Jacobi?’
Madam Jacobi Eberlein is what he
often called her.

And lest that I thought
that her fellow researchers
were unaware of
her wonderful sense of fun,
this is what he wrote
in a postcard we jointly sent to Pat
from that conference.
The postcard depicted
the governor’s mansion
or some imposing stately home,
and the celebrated Pete Stewart
began his note to Madame Jacobi thusly:

‘Hi Pat!
Nil and I have decided to run away together.
What do you think of our new digs?’

I don’t recall what I wrote
except that I addressed that postcard
to Pat’s home, rather than the Dept.

Here is a story about Pat
that is less than a month old
and still fresh in my mind.
In mid-July my husband Steve and I
were in Buffalo to celebrate Pat’s 75th B-day.
She wanted to come to her office
and organize her books and papers,
and the mail that had accumulated
over the past few months.

So, she’d go for radiation treatments
in the mornings,
and we’d bring her into school after that.

She would always walk from the parking lot
to Bell Hall —
and those who saw her then know this was not easy —
but on the way out,
Steve would drive her Saab up to the doors of Bell Hall
while Pat & I proceeded at a more sedate pace
down to the waiting car.

Now, one used to be able
to get pretty directly
from the one-way road behind Bell Hall
onto the road exiting the campus.
But, thanks to ‘recent improvements”
we now had to practically circumnavigate
our fair Amherst campus,
traversing a whole mile
to get to the point that was
in the Euclidean metric,
less than a hundred yards
from the place that we started.

The first day we took the ‘scenic tour’.
The next day, we did it Pat’s way.

‘Steve,’ she commanded, in that rich low voice.
‘Go up there on the sidewalk!’
A mild protest from the law-abiding Steve. Then,
‘Quick, get up there, here’s the nice
wheelchair ramp!’
We were on it
Heck, it was Pat’s 75th B-day.

What followed was a sedate drive
involving no less than 3 different sidewalks,
and 4 right angle turns
with Pat whooping with laughter all the way.

And that’s the way we took Pat home
everyday for the next 3 days.
I cannot describe her delight
each time we proceeded between the trailers
& the engineering [?] in this unorthodox fashion.

We made this trip one last time
on the day that she died,
but this time with her son Patrick.
He had to (and wanted to)
experience Pat’s last ride home from school.

Pat was a rule-breaker
who knew instinctively
which rules to break,
and did so with a flair
that was uniquely her own.

I search for this quality
among people around me,
and I know that I will always miss her.”