An overview of Michel Breger´s career

Abstract

and that is impressive! (Although few of us have much idea what it all means.) He was born Michel (as pronounced in German with a guttural “ch”) and still is Michel to his university administration and to the Austrian Academy of Sciences; he is Mike (from his South African and American nick-name) to his many students past and present, and to most of the international astronomical community – this is even occasionally anglicized to Michael; he is even “Mi-shell Brezhair” in France and Quebec! Mike is a man of many names, but for his more than 35 postgraduate students and many others he is also known as “mentor”, and all of us know him as “friend” and “colleague”. I (DWK) was Mike’s first PhD student at the University of Texas over 30 years ago. When I say that today to his current students and postdocs, I get a look of utter disbelief! I can see in their eyes that they are thinking, “But Mike Breger is so young; how could he have supervised an old guy like you?” Well, Mike is 8 years older than I am, although he appears not to age. I can assure you that he does just at a much slower rate than most of the rest of us – and Fig. 1 proves this. Mike went to school in East Germany following the war; Fig. 8 shows him in a school picture at age 8 in 1949. Then in 1952 his family moved to Swakopmund, Namibia (then South West Africa) which at the time was an officially tri-lingual country where there was good German-language schooling. When it came time to go to university, Mike looked to the best university in Africa – the University of Cape Town (UCT) – where he studied mathematics and physics from 1960 − 1964. Fig. 2 shows his graduation picture. Mike was searching for an honour’s project for his final year at UCT, and a friend, Tony Fairall (now professor of astronomy at UCT), made a fateful suggestion. According to Tony: “We were both students in Driekoppen Res, though Mike was about 2 years senior to me. When he expressed an interest in astronomy, I volunteered to take him to the Royal Observatory. I rode on the back of Mike’s Vespa scooter, introduced him to Dick Stoy and David Evans, and the rest is history!” Mike was impressed particularly with Stoy, who was then the director of the observatory. He found, as he puts it, “Dick Stoy put students at the telescope!” And that lesson stuck. Mike Breger throughout his career with the many students he has supervised “puts students at the telescope”. That is still true today at a time when this is becoming harder as astronomers work in ever larger groups and much observing is service observing on large telescopes. During Mike’s honours year at UCT he not only got to observe, but he clearly showed that he likes to write and he likes to publish – four papers in the Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa (MNASSA) appeared in his final undergraduate year: