&%J LA li LIQUIDS

ELSEVIER Journal of Molecular Liquids, 60 (1994) xi- xiii

Si Dolce Malia

This volume is a small tribute to Teresa Fonseca from some of her friends and professional colleagues. One of Teresa’s characteristics was a genuine interest in the work of others, and she took a sincere pleasure in seeing their accomplishments. She would be happy to see these new things in this volume spring to life.

It is simply not possible to convey in a few feeble lines the sort of person Teresa was. Her way of being a scientist was very much a part of her nature, and in the following, I try to give some small sense of that.

Teresa had a true sense of wonder. She would look at a flower and gently turn it around, gazing at the tiny petals, marvelling at the beauty that she saw, appreciating its grace, and wondering at the miracle that it was. It was this fundamental sense and inspiration that she brought to her work.

For Teresa, the true joy of doing science came from her intense desire to learn. to understand how the molecular world worked. Her philosophy was one that many of us aspire to, but few of us manage to attain. She was very proud of her work, and had a very strong ego, but in a very real way, her ego was hardly involved at all in this striving to see the truth. She would appreciate insights for their own value, no matter whether they were the fruits of her own or of others’ efforts. It was this pure joy of learning---which she had from her early childhood---that was Teresa’s driving force. When she learned something new, she would just glow with pleasure at the sweet magic of it all. She would dance around exclaiming, “This is really beautiful!” This joy can sometimes be seen even in the required staid scientific format of her papers, when she cannot resist putting in exclamation points. In the more spontaneous atmosphere of her talks, she could give freer rein to her excitement. Her sense of the fun of discovery shows very clearly in the transparencies she left behind ---exclamation points everywhere!

One small illustration of Teresa’s approach to learning involves our own work. Together with Kent Wilson’s group at San Diego, we had tested a theory of ours for the reaction transmission coefficient, for sixteen

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different variants of an SN~ reaction in water, and there was agreement to within the simulation error bars for all but one of the cases. I had just learned this news, was very excited about it, and so called Teresa. As Teresa would say, I was “very full of my nose” and ready to be congratulated for what I regarded as a triumph (viewing the single errant case as some sort of aberration). But this was not at all Teresa’s reaction. She only wanted to know more about the case where the theory had failed, because she thought that m was where there was something more, something new to be learned, something not yet comprehended. For her. it was the unknown, the mystery, that held the fascination.

Teresa had the imaginative gift of seeing in her mind’s eye what molecules were doing. For example, she could sense what it must be like to be one of those methanol solvent molecules who had to react to the solute’s charge distribution change in an electronic transition. If she saw that they had to make some sort of tortuous rearrangement, she would say “poor guys!“, shaking her head with empathy. She could see the molecules crowding around the solute, elbowing each other as in some queue for an Italian bus, and then see the molecules farther away coming to the party, just dancing around and trying to find the best places they could. In short, she could think like a molecule, the highest form of the theoretical chemist’s art.

Despite her shy exterior and gentle nature, Teresa could be very very tough when it came to scientific arguments. She and I did not talk about science all that often, but when we argued about such things she was usually right more often than I was. It was typical of her to probe relentlessly and to see clearly the key point, and then not give up in her arguments until you (and she) were convinced. Then she would make a little joke about it all, no matter who was right. Hyung Kim tells the story of how he and Teresa used to argue constantly and with great zeal and zest about a certain prediction in one of Hyung’s reaction theories. Finally, she designed some computer simulations to settle the issue which, in Hyung’s words, “completely demolished my theory”. But at the same time and after, Teresa and Hyung were the best of friends, joking and laughing, and truly caring about each other. Science was vital and important to Teresa, but she thought that it should never eclipse, or even threaten, the special and central things of life.

Teresa’s courage was truly extraordinary, and she had to summon it too many times in her brief life. During her battle with cancer, it was a source of continual amazement and inspiration to those around her. It moved one of her doctors to say that he had not seen such a spirit in all his

many years of practice. She was indomitable, fighting back in her illness over and over, doing derivations in her sickbed, giving talks when she would sometimes have to struggle simply to speak. For her, it was a natural, the only, way to be, a reflection of her very strong will and her deep determination, and her essential optimism---“1 am optimist!“, she would say. She rarely showed or talked about her intense struggle but instead put her extra energy into concerns for those around her, whether it was calming other patients’ fears or counselling to colleagues in scientific difficulty: “no fear and no retreat!“. Teresa was also concerned that the desire to learn that was so important to her be fostered in others, and that their achievements be recognized. To this end, she arranged for prizes in Chemistry at Porto, Colorado State and Colorado Universities to be established. The first is for the best undergraduate at her alma mater, and the last two she wished to be for a specific piece of scientific research---to learn something new!

There is an aria from La Bohtme that I think captures something of the essence of Teresa. It is inscribed on the aquarium in her memory in the Boulder Community Hospital’s new cancer wing that she helped to design while she was a patient there. In the Italian language that she loved, it reads

“Mi piaccion quelle case the han si dolce malia, . . . quelle case the han nome poesia. ”

“I love those things which have such a sweet magic . . . those things whose name is poetry.”

Casey Hynes

Boulder, Colorado