^In response to an inquiry as to who was the chair of the Brandeis mathematics department in 1951, Richard Palais replied (19 Sept. 2012) by email: "I didn't become a member of the department myself until 1960, which was just a year or two after the graduate program was getting organized. Remember, Brandeis was only founded in 1948, and it takes a few years to get things organized, and I was under the impression that Oscar was the first chair, and that before 1952 there was no math department as such, just a few teachers of math. The sentence at the bottom of page 101 of Sachar's "A Host at Last" lists a group of seven original "nucleus" members of the department, and I am reasonably sure that none of them preceded Oscar as chair."
