A20 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
Kansai Yamamoto, the unapolo-
getically flamboyant fashion de-
signer whose love of color, unfet-
tered imagination and exploration
of genderless dressing caught the
eye of David Bowie and helped de-
fine the look of his alter ego, Ziggy
Stardust, died in Japan on July 21.
He was 76.
The cause was leukemia, a
statement on his office website
confirmed.
Kansai, as Mr. Yamamoto was
generally known, was not as well-
known as some of his more high-
profile Japanese fashion contem-
poraries, including Yohji Yama-
moto, Issey Miyake and Rei
Kawakubo of Comme des
Garçons. But it was Kansai who
led the way for a generation of
Japanese design talents to make
their mark on the Western indus-
try.
In 1971, he was among the first
Japanese designers to show in
London — a full decade before Ms.
Kawakubo and the other Mr. Ya-
mamoto. His signature aesthetic
of sculptural shapes, clashing tex-
tures and prints, and eye-popping
color combinations attracted in-
dustry attention.
Kansai’s debut collection was
splashed across the cover of
Harpers & Queen magazine with
the tagline “Explosion from To-
kyo,” and his growing profile led to
collaborations with the decade’s
most important musician show-
men, including Elton John and
Stevie Wonder in addition to Mr.
Bowie, with whom he formed a
longstanding creative relation-
ship.
“Color is like the oxygen we areboth breathing in the same space,”
Kansai once said of his work with
Mr. Bowie, who died in 2016.
In a talk at the Brooklyn Mu-
seum during its 2018 “David Bow-
ie Is” exhibition, to which he wore
an elaborate black-and-gold bro-
cade suit that he characterized as
“minimal,” Kansai recalled meet-
ing Mr. Bowie in 1973. Mr. Bowie’s
producer had called Kansai and
asked him to come to Radio City
Music Hall in New York, where, in
a concert, Mr. Bowie descended
the stage on a giant disco ball.
The two men soon discovered
that they shared a love of “radicalappearance” and pushing bound-
aries. In fact, Mr. Bowie had been
wearing Kansai’s women’s wear
since 1971. From 1973 onward,
they worked together to create
one-off showpieces for Mr. Bow-
ie’s stage personas and music
tours, including the 1973 “Aladdin
Sane” tour.
There were exuberant skintight
jumpsuits with giant flared hems
and silken brocade bomber jack-
ets, androgynous cloaks with cut-
aways and vivid platform shoes.
Often, the costumes incorporated
elements from Japanese culture,
particularly the silhouette of the
kimono and the bold aesthetics of
medieval samurai warlords.
“I approached Bowie’s clothes
as if I was designing for a female,”
Kansai said at the Brooklyn Mu-
seum talk, pointing out that there
was “no zipper in front.” He also
said that the number of costume
changes required had inspired
him to use snaps on Mr. Bowie’s
costumes, so they could be re-
moved faster.
His favorite piece for the singer
was the black-and-white jumpsuit
with bowed legs featured in the
“David Bowie Is” exhibition,
which was first mounted in 2013 at
the Victoria & Albert Museum in
London before traveling around
the world.
“I found David’s aesthetic andinterest in transcending gender
boundaries shockingly beautiful,”
Kansai told the website The Cut in
2018.
Born on Feb. 8, 1944 in Yokoha-
ma, on Japan’s east coast, Kansai
Yamamoto did not have a happy
childhood. His parents divorced
when he was 7, and he was sent to
a children’s home. He traveled
with his two younger brothers —
ages 3 and 5 — from Yokohama to
Tokyo and then to the far-flung
southwestern province of Kochi.“How much I envied the lights
of happy families that I saw from
the window of the slow train at
dusk,” he once said. “It was lonely,
and I still can’t forget that.”
He studied civil engineering be-
fore leaving school in 1962 to
study English at Nippon Univer-
sity. A self-taught fashion de-
signer (despite saying later that
“fashion is not a profession I
would recommend”) he founded
his own business, Yamamoto Kan-
sai Company, at 28, the year of his
first London show.
After his heyday in the 1970s
and ’80s, and as Japanese fashion
gained global prominence for its
cultivation of a pared-back min-
imalism, Kansai continued to ex-
plore his interest in traditional
Japanese clothing and craftsman-
ship, but with a distinctive and
fantastical flourish.
He often pointed to his long-
standing affinity with the Japa-
nese concept of basara, a love of
color and flamboyance; one that
stood directly in contrast with the
idea of wabi-sabi, the Buddhist
ideal of the beauty in imperfec-
tion, modesty and humble ma-
terials.
Starting in 1993 in Red Square
in Moscow, he began producing
evermore extravagant “super
shows,” including one that in-
volved a gigantic inflatable whale.In 2017, he experienced some-
thing of a renaissance when he
was asked by Louis Vuitton to cre-
ate a number of looks for its 2018
resort collection show held in Ky-
oto, Japan. Kansai created several
new graphics, including Kabuki-
themed handbags and shimmery
dresses emblazoned with the
faces of grimacing yakko war-
riors.
He and Mr. Bowie remained
friends until the singer’s death. In
2013, the two had discussed doing
a “super show” together, for which
Kansai would create the clothes
and also produce the spectacle.
Kansai said he owned two 35-foot
air balloons (though no car).
“To have Bowie sit atop those
air balloons, and have him sing his
songs, was my dream,” he said in
2018.
In an Instagram post on Mon-
day, Mr. Yamamoto’s daughter,
Mirai Yamamoto, said her father
“had left this world peacefully,
surrounded by loved ones.” Infor-
mation on other survivors was not
immediately available.
Despite his illness, Kansai con-
tinued to work for as long as he
was able: He had recently been
planning a trip to the North Pole to
research an ice-themed show.
“People always want origi-
nality,” he said. “That’s the fu-
ture.”MINORU IWASAKI/KYODO NEWS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSVINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESVINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESKansai Yamamoto at a fashion show in Beijing in 2012. He dressed David Bowie in eye-popping showpieces like a black-and-white jumpsuit with red Kabuki boots inspired by Japanese culture.
Kansai Yamamoto, Designer to the Stars (and a Starman), Is Dead at 76
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN
and ELIZABETH PATONKansai in London in 1971. His
success paved the way for
other Japanese design talents.ERIC PIPER/MIRRORPIX, VIA GETTY IMAGESCreating a look for
Ziggy Stardust with
exuberant jumpsuits.
Ronald L. Graham, who gained
renown with wide-ranging theo-
rems in a field known as discrete
mathematics that have found uses
in diverse areas, ranging from
making telephone and computer
networks more efficient to ex-
plaining the dynamics of juggling,
died on July 6 at his home in the La
Jolla section of San Diego. He was
84.
The cause was bronchiectasis, a
chronic lung condition, according
to a statement from the University
of California, San Diego, where Dr.
Graham was an emeritus profes-
sor.
“He created a lot of mathemat-
ics and some really pretty cool
stuff,” said Peter Winkler, a math-
ematician at Dartmouth College.
“This occurred over many years,
and so it’s only now that we get to
sort of look back and see all the
stuff that he did.”
One thing he did was develop
methods for worst-case analysis
in scheduling theory — that is,
whether the order in which ac-
tions are scheduled wastes time.
On another front, with his wife and
frequent collaborator, Fan Chung,
an emeritus mathematician at the
University of California, San
Diego, he developed the idea of
quasi-random graphs, which ap-
plied numerical preciseness in de-
scribing the random-like struc-
ture of networks.
Dr. Graham’s research was de-
tailed in about 400 papers, but he
never fit the stereotype of a nerdy
mathematician. Soft-spoken but
garrulous, he leavened his talks
on high-level equations with silly
jokes and sight gags. He was also
an expert trampoline gymnast
and juggler, a side pursuit — he
was elected president of the Inter-
national Jugglers’ Association in
1972 — that in his hands also lent
itself to mathematical analysis. At
one point Dr. Graham and three
other juggling mathematicians
proved an equation for the num-
ber of possible ball-juggling pat-
terns before a pattern repeats.
Dr. Graham was a collaborator
and close friend of Paul Erdos, one
of the great mathematicians of the
20th century. Dr. Erdos cared only
about numbers, so much so that
he lived without a permanent
home or job. Carrying a single
piece of battered luggage, he
would flit from one place to an-
other, relying on the hospitality of
colleagues, including Dr. Graham,
who set aside a room at his home
for him.
Dr. Erdos was not, however, the
easiest of houseguests. “After a
couple of days, they start fight-
ing,” Dr. Chung said of him and her
husband.
When they met, Dr. Graham
and Dr. Erdos were among the few
working in discrete mathematics,particularly in an area known as
combinatorics — the mathematics
of combinations.
In an introductory probability
class, a simple combinatorics
problem might ask: If one pulls
three balls at random out of a bag
that contains six blue ones and
four red ones, what are the
chances that all three are red?
(The answer is 1 out of 30.)
Combinatorics proved to be im-
portant to the rise of digital tech-
nology in the 1970s. “Such think-
ing was exactly right for many of
the key issues in theoretical com-
puter science,” said Andrew
Granville, a mathematician at the
University of Montreal.
It led to what became known as
Graham’s number, which was for a
time the largest number used in a
proof, according to the Guinness
Book of World Records. The num-
ber came out of a problem known
as the Ramsey theory, which
states that in large systems there
can never be complete disorder,
that pockets of structure will ap-
pear within the apparent chaos.
Dr. Graham was looking atcubes in which the lines between
the corners were colored red or
blue. In a three-dimensional cube,
it is easy to color the lines so that
no planar slice of the cube with
four vertexes has edges all of one
color. But mathematicians can
also imagine cubes in four dimen-
sions and greater, and so Dr. Gra-
ham wanted to know whether this
property of being able to avoid
slices of one color would persist in
greater dimensions.
“The answer: no,” Dr. Graham
explained in 2014 in an episode of
Numberphile, a math show on
YouTube. “If the dimension is
large enough, you cannot avoid it.
No matter how you color it, you
cannot avoid it.”
No one knows in precisely what
dimension this unavoidability
would kick in, but Dr. Graham cal-
culated an upper bound for the an-
swer — a number so huge that
there is not enough space in the
entire universe in which to write
all of the digits.
Ronald Lewis Graham was
born to Leo and Margaret Jane
(Anderson) Graham on Oct. 31,
1935, in Taft, Calif., an oil- and gas-
producing region about 120 miles
northwest of Los Angeles. His fa-
ther worked in the oil fields, and
both parents later worked in ship-
yards, moving with the family
back and forth between California
and Georgia, resulting in Ronald’s
skipping several grades. After his
parents divorced, he and his
mother moved to Florida.
Without graduating from high
school, Ronald received a Ford
Foundation scholarship to attend
the University of Chicago at 15.
When his scholarship ran out, he
transferred to the University of
California, Berkeley, where he
majored in electrical engineering
and also studied number theory.
In 1955, he enlisted in the
United States Air Force and was
assigned to a base in Fairbanks,
Alaska. He signed up to work the
night shift so that he could attend
the University of Alaska, about 30
miles away. He received his bach-
elor’s degree in 1958 in physics,
because the university was not ac-
credited to award degrees inmathematics.
He returned to Berkeley for
graduate school, where he and
two friends formed a professional
trampoline group, the Bouncing
Baers, which performed with a
circus.
After obtaining a doctoral de-
gree in mathematics from Berke-
ley in 1962, Dr. Graham joined Bell
Labs, solving problems that
proved helpful for a telephone
company. In the 1960s, a Bell Labs
engineer named John R. Pierce
came up with the idea of dividing
up how phone calls were sent from
one place to another, a precursor
to what is now known as packet
switching.
“Until then, communication
was done by phone lines, and lines
had to be open from one end to the
other,” Dr. Winkler said.
In Dr. Pierce’s method, the data
carrying the sound of a phone call
was chopped apart, and “that in-
formation would be piled into
these little packets, and thesepackets would swim around the
network,” Dr. Winkler said.
That was more efficient, since
one phone line could now handle
many calls at once. But “the key to
such a system is how to assign ad-
dresses to the nodes so that the
packets can find their way
around,” Dr. Winkler said.
Dr. Pierce used unique strings
of 0s and 1s, but the labeling
method failed, so he sought help
from Dr. Graham and Henry O.
Pollak, another Bell mathemati-
cian. In 1971, Dr. Graham and Dr.
Pollak came up with another la-
beling technique using an asterisk
in addition to 0 and 1. (The as-
terisks represented “don’t care”
— designating parts of the ad-
dress that were not used in calcu-
lating where the packet should be
sent next.)
“They came up with an idea
which, frankly, sounds to me like a
bad idea, even though I was even-
tually the person who proved that
it worked,” Dr. Winkler said. “Imean, even in retrospect, I don’t
see how they saw this.”
After the breakup of AT&T, Dr.
Graham became the chief scien-
tist of AT&T Labs. In 1999, he be-
came a professor of computer and
information science at the Univer-
sity of California, San Diego.
He never stopped exploring
mathematical problems, and sev-
eral new papers of his have yet to
be published.
Dr. Graham was president of
the two largest professional math-
ematics organizations in the
United States — the American
Mathematical Society and the
Mathematical Association of
America — and a member of the
National Academy of Sciences.
His first three marriages ended
in divorce.
In addition to Dr. Chung, whom
he married in 1983, survivors in-
clude a son, Marc; three daugh-
ters, Ché Graham, Christy New-
man and Laura Lindauer; two
stepchildren, Dean Chung and
Laura Bower; a brother, Jerry
Graham; and 11 grandchildren.
Dr. Winkler remembered a visit
by Dr. Graham to Emory Univer-
sity about 40 years ago. During
the talk, Dr. Graham placed a slide
on the overhead projector, and
people in the audience began
pointing out that it appeared to be
upside down or backward. But no
matter how Dr. Graham flipped it,
it still looked wrong.
In fact, individual letters had
been written backward on the
slide to create the confusion.
“It was marvelous because ev-
erybody in the audience thought
that they knew what could be
done to this slide to make it right,”
Dr. Winkler said. “It was a sight
gag.”
After the talk, Dr. Graham
asked if there was a large field
nearby. There was, and he got the
mathematicians to pile into cars.
Once there, Dr. Graham opened
the attaché case that he had con-
spicuously brought to the lecture.
“It was full of boomerangs,” Dr.
Winkler said. “And Ron proceeded
to show us all how to throw a
boomerang. We had a ball. We had
an absolutely wonderful time.”Ronald Graham, 84, Who Saw Magic
In the Higher Planes of Mathematics
By KENNETH CHANGRonald Graham in 1988. He
performed with a circus before
making serious breakthroughs
in discrete mathematics.PETER VIDORA pre-eminent figure
in combinatorics and
a world-class juggler.