A Man of Many Numbers : * Caltech: Mathemetician and JPL scientist Leslie Deutsch is also an accomplished music composer and performer.

When Caltech administrators decided that somebody should write a piece of music to commemorate the school’s centennial, there was really only one man for the job: a breezy mathematician who communicates with spacecraft at the edge of the solar system for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Leslie Deutsch is one of the world’s premier scientists in the field of digital signal processing, whose practitioners can capture bits of information transmitted electronically by Voyager, Galileo and other space exploring craft and translate them, pixel by pixel, into high-resolution pictures.

Deutsch is also a syncopatin’ sideman, whose Dixieland riffs on trumpet and piano have graced jazz festivals in such places as Pocatello, Ida., and Seaside, Ore., and a composer of serious orchestral music. He’s also been a major part of the Caltech music scene since he entered the school as a freshman in 1972.

Because of his range of interests and expertise, the 36-year-old Caltech graduate and Ph.D. holder is a source of wonder to many of his JPL colleagues.

“You don’t get to where he is at his age without being somewhat different from the rest of us,” says Laif Swanson, who supervises a JPL research group on information theory that is administered by Deutsch. “My theory is that he just skipped being a teen-ager. He went from 10 to 20 and saved himself some years in there.”

Is there some mysterious connection between his scientific and musical proclivities? Deutsch isn’t quite sure.

“Math tends to be very abstract, like music,” says Deutsch, a brisk, fast-talking man with an eroding hairline, during a rare timeout in his office at JPL. “The things you work with you can only imagine. You don’t work with solid things.”

But there’s nothing particularly abstract about Deutsch’s “Centennial Suite for Band,” a jazz-inflected classical composition that premiered last May during centennial observances in a performance by the Caltech Wind Ensemble.

Deutsch himself will conduct the piece today at a concert by the Caltech-Occidental Band in Thorne Auditorium on the Occidental College campus.

He wrote the suite directly from his experiences as an undergraduate at Caltech, he says. “It’s an impressionistic piece--four moods in the Caltech life cycle.”

“The first movement, ‘Fanfare,’ shows the awe of students entering Caltech. Then there’s ‘Ruckus,’ showing the high pressures of the Caltech lifestyle. ‘Chorale,’ representing the brief moments of calm in a student’s life, is the least realistic of the movements. ‘March’ suggests how the student feels when he knows he’s going to graduate.”

Bill Bing, Caltech’s director of instrumental music and the one who persuaded Deutsch to write the piece and then directed its premiere, calls it “an absolutely delightful composition.” Like all of Deutsch’s music, Bing says, it is never too brainy or high-toned to be accessible to average listeners.

“I hesitate to use the word genius, which I think we should use very sparingly,” says Bing of his former student. “But I’ve told people that, if I’ve ever met a genius, I’d have to put Les in that category.”

Deutsch seemed to be winging toward an eclectically creative life from early childhood. His father, Ralph Deutsch, was a trumpet-playing physicist and mathematician who became intrigued by the notion of using computers to enhance music and musical instruments.

The elder Deutsch eventually set up a company in his San Fernando Valley home to develop digitally computerized instruments, and he began turning out inventions, including the first digital organ.

Leslie Deutsch himself holds more than two dozen patents for electronic music devices and software, with names like “polyphonic musical tone generator” (a fundamental part of a synthesizer) and “octave phase decoupling in an electronic musical instrument” (a device to make electronic music sound more like acoustic music).

The Deutsch household in Sherman Oaks resounded with classical music, and young Leslie took organ and trumpet lessons. He was never interested in rock ‘n’ roll, he says, because the music wasn’t challenging.

“The thing I didn’t like about popular music was that there wasn’t much that was intellectual in the composition,” he says.

But jazz, particularly the complex big band arrangements of the 1970s, grabbed him in high school. “Some of the music of Buddy Rich and Don Ellis almost had a classical feeling,” he says.

By the time he got to Caltech, he was writing compositions of his own. Bing remembers Deutsch as a fresh-faced undergraduate member of the Caltech Jazz Band, who had an almost uncanny facility for playing a variety of musical instruments.

“The first year, I think, he played sax,” Bing says. “Then, the next year, we needed a keyboard player, so he played keyboard. One year, he played trumpet. With the Wind Ensemble, he played everything from tuba to flute.”

He also wrote some compositions, including “Another Shade of Blues” and “Prelude and Fugue in G Minor for Jazz Band,” that are still part of the Caltech band’s repertoire.

After joining JPL immediately after earning his Ph.D. at Caltech, he became known as a quietly effective researcher and as the JPL party host with the most. The young mathematician’s house in Chatsworth bounced with live jazz, with Deutsch always in the thick of it.

“When I first got to JPL, he was a kid just out of school, and he was immediately the most helpful person there,” Swanson says. “He helped me figure out this new computer system, which would have taken me forever.”

Some wondered how the energetic young researcher--who found himself leading 180 engineers, mathematicians and scientists in only his sixth year at JPL--would handle a diverse group of people, most of them highly educated technicians and scientists who were older than him.

“He did very well,” says co-worker Ray Jurgens. “He has an amazing talent for not ruffling people. He became sort of a good friend to a lot of people.”

Deutsch has moved extraordinarily quickly up the JPL ladder, becoming in 12 years there one of the youngest ever to reach the managerial ranks. He is now the laboratory’s manager of telecommunications technology development, giving him responsibility for developing new tracking devices for NASA’s deep space network.

As a manager, he misses direct involvement in research, he says. As a researcher, Deutsch has led projects in, among others, microelectronics, optical communications and digital systems. “Every time you get promoted, it’s a chance to learn something new,” he says.

Deutsch fits his music in where he can. The room over his garage, where he goes to compose music, is full of electronic equipment, including a Deutsch-engineered Kawai digital organ.

The demands of his job have forced him to give up his position as organist and choirmaster at Temple Adat Ari El in North Hollywood. But he still finds time to travel to jazz festivals as a member of the Hot Frogs Jumping Jazz Band, a Dixieland group.

And he has plans to spend more time in that apartment over the garage. Friends never know what to expect when the inspiration hits Deutsch. A few years ago, he emerged with a concerto in four movements, with a different solo instrument featured in each movement.

At a Caltech event that year, Deutsch played all the solo parts: tuba, trumpet, flute and piano.

But Deutsch has no particular composition in mind now. “I just let myself go where the music leads,” he says.