Of Eccentricity and Strength of Character

Philip T. ("Phil") Guza was known to those who knew and loved him and those he knew and loved as a man of many eccentricities.  He grew up in Philadelphia, attending and graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School, which is where he first developed his love for mathematics.  He further fed his passion for mathematics during his undergraduate studies at Lehigh University and, thereafter, his graduate studies at Princeton University, where he attained a doctorate in mathematics in 1972.  He earned his PhD with a dissertation entitled, "Finite Groups Having Fixed-Point-Free Automorphism of Prime Order."  In his professional life, mathematics took him first to Rutgers University, where he taught it, and thereafter to Aon Risk Services, where he applied his interest in and his love for mathematics to the insurance business.  

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Phil Guza was at work in his office on the 105th floor of the South Tower when terrorists attacked the North Tower at 8:46 am.  Able to see what had happened from his office window, he phoned home, got the answering machine, told his family that he was safe and sound  and that the incident had happened at the North Tower and not his building.  He told them he loved them, hung up, and went back to dealing with the meticulous, often complex work that fed and fueled his pursuit of all things intellectual.  Less than twenty minutes later, the terrorists turned their attention to the South Tower, flying a jet into the building many floors below Aon's offices, and trapping those still in them.  Phil Guza was fifty-four.  

A resident of Sea Bright, New Jersey, Phil Guza loved to bowl (which he did well), loved to play golf (which he did not do nearly as well), and loved to go crabbing in the Shrewsbury River with his sons, Tom and Peter.  He also loved to vacation in what one might consider (and not unfairly) a somehwhat unconventional manner.  By way of example, he would buy airline tickets for someplace he would take Tom and Peter but make no other arrangements.  He would make neither a rental car reservation nor a hotel reservation.  His sons loved it.  "It was hilarious the way we'd get on a plane and just show up.  He'd get a car and we would just drive until he found a cheap motel or some interesting museum.  Dad wasn't much for planning", according to Tom Guza.  

-AK