Jiri Cizek: Grandfather. Quantum physicist. Book lover. Ice-cream connoisseur. Born Aug. 24, 1938 in Prague; died Dec. 24, 2024, in Toronto, from COVID-19; aged 86.
Jiri CizekCourtesy of family
Jiri Cizek, a mathematician, orbited through life in cycles of exile and reunion.
He is best known for his 1966 work called Coupled Clusters Theory, now considered foundational in the field of molecular chemistry. He was a lifelong lateral thinker whose intellectual gymnastics defied the boundaries of theoretical math, quantum physics and molecular chemistry. But to his children, he always described his coupled clusters simply as, “the study of how electrons hold hands.”
Jiri was born days before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. His parents, both doctors, were busy at the clinics, so as a small boy, he often walked home alone across town from the English School. During air raids, strangers would grab his hand to pull him off the sidewalk into the safety of bomb shelters. In 1940, his mother, a pediatrician, was fired from her position at the state hospital by Nazi collaborators – for her Jewish ancestry. She found work at a private clinic and, after the war, she went on to become the country’s founder of children’s endocrinology. Meanwhile, at the family villa, Jiri was raised by his grandmother, Marie, who doted on the smart, but starry-eyed child. Everyone assumed he would also become a doctor. But Jiri gravitated toward philosophy and mathematics by way of model airplanes, which he built in his tiny bedroom in the attic. He was already amassing books like a magnet. By 17, Jiri had developed a mastery of calculus and published his first two scientific papers on polarography before graduating from high school.
A year later, he lost his father to a heart attack. Jiri was devastated but completed his Master’s thesis and then turned to Mathematics and Quantum Physics to pursue his PhD.
At the Academy, he met and fell in love with lab technician Ludmila Zamazalova. They began secretly dating, until one day on the elevator, he overheard colleagues making fun of her for flooding the building after she had forgotten to turn off a tap. He broke his silence to defend her honour and they married shortly thereafter. Their son, Petr, was born in 1964.
Before his marriage, the regime unexpectedly permitted Jiri to pursue research in Paris. There, he acquired his love for the French language, French New Wave Cinema and croissants. He also had his first exposure to a powerful IBM computer. But even still, there weren’t yet computer programs strong enough to calculate molecules and atoms in the way Jiri had in mind. So he did most of it by hand.
At the Academy, Jiri Cizek met and fell in love with lab technician Ludmila Zamazalova, who he would later marry.Courtesy of family
When Russian tanks rolled in to crush Prague Spring in 1968, Canadian friends scrambled to organize an invitation for Jiri and family to visit the recently established University of Waterloo. The stay was meant to last only a few months. But soon his daughter, Katerina, was born and months turned into years. He arranged for his mother to join the family and Jiri settled into life as a professor of Applied Mathematics. His office was in the Math building, built around a massive room to house an IBM computer. By then, computer programs were strong enough for Jiri to calculate: he often ran complicated calculations over weekends, much to the chagrin of the technicians who would call him in the middle of the night complaining he had crashed the whole mainframe – again.
In his spare time, Jiri continued to build a library of thousands of books. At birthdays and Christmas, he had an annoying habit of grabbing other people’s newly gifted books right out of their hands. He would retreat to a corner, read it, in full, within an hour, and then tell the new book owner whether it was worth reading or not. In the political education of his children, he was careful to distinguish between the principles of communism and the insidiousness of authoritarianism.
Jiri was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; he received a Sloan Fellowship and a Humboldt Award. He was a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. In the Czech Republic, he received many accolades, from honorary member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic to the 2006 Czech Spirit Award. The Czech Press reported he was on the shortlist for a Nobel in Chemistry for many years running.
After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Jiri resumed close connections with his home country and organized a book drive, shipping over 10,000 scientific books for donation to a new Czech University.
He retired in 1996 and became Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Waterloo. He spent several months every summer in Prague with Ludmila. After her death in 2008, he continued to split his time between the two countries, but for the last decade, Jiri settled in Toronto to stay close to his beloved granddaughter, Ava.
At 80, only days before the pandemic lockdown, Jiri moved into long-term care. He continued to read voraciously, surrounded by enormous stacks of open books and hundreds of his own handwritten journals. He followed the news closely and was horrified by the bombing attacks on Ukraine and Gaza, which brought up many memories of his days as a starry-eyed boy walking alone in the streets of Prague. He ultimately succumbed to the impact of a second COVID infection and died peacefully with family holding his hand.
Katerina Cizek is Jiri Cizek’s daughter.
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