Francis Low, 85; was MIT professor, provost

Long before he roamed the halls of MIT as a professor and provost, Francis E. Low dabbled in a more pedestrian endeavor: He was a mule driver for the Army during World War II.

"Mule driver to provost in one generation, only in America," he liked to say. Slightly less blithe in an autobiographical sketch, he wrote that while such duty "is no pleasure, it was an experience which I am sure few elementary particle theorists have enjoyed."

Physicist and composer, pilot and skier, Dr. Low also took such pleasure in wearing down opponents with volleys and serves that when he wrote a draft of his own obituary seven years ago, he hoped he might die "after collapsing during a tennis game."

Dr. Low, who formerly directed MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics and its Laboratory for Nuclear Science, died Feb. 16 of heart failure in Haverford, Pa., at The Quadrangle community care home. He was 85 and had lived in Belmont for 55 years before moving close to his eldest daughter.

As provost for five years, beginning in 1980, Dr. Low was instrumental in elevating the role of humanities education at the school and helped guide negotiations that brought about MIT's close affiliation with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, said Paul Gray, a former MIT president.

With a friend, Dr. Low also rewrote the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's unofficial alma mater to make it gender neutral as women began to make up a significant percentage of graduates.

"He had a unique blend of being a superior theoretical physicist, a quite able, effective administrator, and a really marvelous human being," said John Deutch, an institute professor at MIT and a former provost.

"He was a brilliant, gifted theoretical physicist with deep insights and understandings of the field," said Marvin Goldberger, a former president of the California Institute of Technology who is emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego. "It was always a pleasure to work with him because he was so smart and so fun to be around."

In the classroom, Dr. Low was a deft teacher. He was as modest about that work as he was about the rest of his life.

"I am afraid the neat, clean lecture is not mine; rather the digression within the digression," he wrote. "I don't worry about finishing a prescribed amount of material, but go on at whatever pace seems natural."

"I always thought of him as the smartest man I ever knew, and not because he ever said so," said his daughter, Margaret Low Smith of Rockville, Md. "He was very gentle and enormously gracious. There was something incredibly pure and decent about him."

A scion of Socialist royalty, he grew up an only child next to Washington Square Park in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. His maternal grandparents were physicians and political activists; his grandfather helped found the Socialist Party of America.

His mother, also a doctor, made house calls at night in Greenwich Village until she turned 80, treating patients such as humorist S.J. Perelman and anthropologist Margaret Mead. His father was an engineer.

Despite being raised in a scientific household, Dr. Low did not envision a similar future for himself.

"At home I studied the piano seriously," he wrote. "I don't recall knowing the meaning of the words 'physics' and 'chemistry.' "

That changed when he went to Switzerland, where his mother was born, to spend his final two years of high school at Ecole Internationale in Geneva.

"I discovered physics," he wrote. "Somehow I loved it, and knew that I wanted more."

Graduating from Harvard College in three years, he enlisted in the Army and wound up as a survey sergeant, with his mule team in northern Italy. After World War II, he at first tried to become a professional musician.

"I think it took me exactly three weeks to discover that it was not for me," he wrote. "I loved it, but I could not devote myself exclusively to it. Like living on ice cream, perhaps."

Instead, he went to Columbia University and received a doctorate in physics. And he met Natalie Sadigur.

"She was beautiful and gifted, and Francis was dear and beautiful and gifted," said their friend Judy Siegman of Brooklyn, who set them up on a blind date. She added, laughing: "I was very glad it took. I loved them both."

They were graduate students when they married in 1948; she became a psychologist. Once Dr. Low finished at Columbia, he went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., which was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. A few years earlier, Dr. Low had worked briefly on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer, he wrote, "had an amazing ability to grasp and explain quickly and clearly what was going on, even in fairly remote fields."

From there Dr. Low taught physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1956 he went to MIT as a visiting professor and joined the physics faculty the next year. The family moved to Belmont in 1958.

"When he did science, he did it to perfection," Deutch said. "He liked to write science so the end product was a perfect jewel. It was beautifully written."

More than a scientist, Dr. Low touched souls, his friends and colleagues said.

"He's a great loss," said Deutch. "I loved him very much."

Dr. Low's wife died four years ago, also on the Friday before Presidents' Day. They had been married 54 years.

Even as his health failed, he could still summon the youthful pianist who had once contemplated a life in music. With his longtime friend and lyricist Alvin Kahn of Cambridge, Dr. Low had written many songs that recalled the tunes of Cole Porter, "including 'The Big, Big G,' which was about gravity, keeping it in his field," Kahn said.

The two also collaborated on a musical based on "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

"At Christmastime, my husband sat down with him at the piano," his daughter said. "He was pretty frail, but you could put him at the piano, and the magic still happened."

In addition to his daughter Margaret, Dr. Low leaves another daughter, Julie of Haverford, Pa.; a son, Peter of New York City; and six grandsons.

A memorial service will be held Monday at 11 a.m. in the MIT Chapel.