PSU Magazine Spring 1993

method that could be used by Catholics, who must, according to church law, avoid artificial means of contraception. In 1981 Perkowski visited Pope John Paul II and eventual– ly received some Vatican funding for his research. The technique involves microphotography of vaginal mucus, which changes composition and forms different patterns at various stages of the menstrual cycle. At the moment of ovulation, the mucus "fems," or creates lacy branches resembling the real plant. Photographs of the feming can be processed electronically to remove the "noise" and emphasize certain fea– tures of the patterns. He is now investigating whether the feming method can be useful in infer– tility research, an area that has grown rapidly in the United States in recent years. A second application of image processing is in cardiology. Here, a large number of two-dimensional images are combined to make a three– dimensional shape. , "An image of the heart has a lot of noise," Perkowski says. He is refining the method to identify particular fea– tures of the heart, measure them, and eliminate the noise so the orientation of the heart's axes relative to the body, as well as any deformities, will be revealed. Graduate students find Perkowski an inspiration and a challenge. "He's very motivated. He's a very innovative thinker," says Stanton. As an example, he cites another of Perkowski's ideas, yet to be developed: a form of sonar-driven musical composi– tion that could help blind people iden– tify their surroundings by associating certain pitches, tones and timbres with particular shapes, such as vertical, horizontal, straight and curved lines. "He has a lot of students because of his many ideas," Stanton adds. "That keeps him almost swamped most of the time." Doug Hall, a Ph.D. student and ad– junct professor of electrical engineer– ing, says, "He's interested in everything, and he's accumulated a vast amount of knowledge in the last 20 years. If you're in his class or you go Perkowski with PSUBOT to talk to him, you have to wear your track shoes because his mind runs about 100 miles per hour." Perkowski's activities aren't con– fined merely to research, publishing, teaching and graduate student super– vision. He has also worked with the Polish community in Portland, teach– ing Polish to children, translating for refugees and government agencies and working with the Polish library association. Social activism is nothing new. He led student strikes in 1968 and was a member of the Solidarity Movement at the Technical University of Warsaw. When martial law was imposed in Poland in the early 1980s, many of his colleagues were imprisoned or per– secuted. At the time, Perkowski was completing a visiting professorship at the University of Minnesota and reluc– tantly decided to emigrate. Since then, he says, he prefers to avoid politics because of its nebulous distinction between truth and falsity. "My heart is not in politics. In science I am on very firm ground," he says. The notion of leisure time seems alien to Perkowski. Even his favorite recreational activity-working on com– puter animation with his 12-year-old son-falls within the boundaries of his professional interest. But he has managed to travel extensively in the American Southwest and hopes some day to find the time to return to the woodcarving he learned from his father. It would be easy to label Perkowski as the stereotypical absent-minded professor-preoccupied with mental activity, hyper-rational and distant from the everyday world-the polar opposite of the emotional, associative "artistic" type. Not true, says Hall. "You might think he's only techni– cal, but on a personal level he's a really nice guy," Hall says. "If you do your share of the bargain and are not wast– ing his time, he'll spend all the time in the world." The cyberspace universe of com– puter science merges linearity with associativity, two modes of thinking often considered mutually exclusive. Perkowski doesn't feel compelled to choose between them. For him, binary decision-making doesn't eliminate the ghost in the machine, the leap of faith necessary to creativity. Hall says, "He has very, very exten– sive knowledge in a wide range of areas around logic optimization and other topics. He ties them all together. He's really good at connecting pieces from different fields into the area. He's constantly studying, and it shows." Some of Perkowski's bridge-building talent may come from another family pattern. The men on his father's side tend to be scientists, but they tend to marry artists. Perkowski's mother was an actress. Opera singers and writers pepper her family tree. Perkowski's wife Kaja, the daughter of a well-known Polish puppeteer, is the American cor– respondent for a Polish girls' magazine. As the science of chaos is beginning to show, patterns exist even in the most unmanageable flow of things and events. Perhaps Perkowski can manipu– late logical systems because he has a high tolerance for their opposites. D (Valerie Brown is a Portland freelance writer.) PSU 21