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| Traveling Salesman Problem illustration |
His stately house has a huge wooden front door with elaborate decoration and a very small mail slot so my big envelope did not fit in. Rather than opening the envelope and folding the MAPS to fit the slot, I rang the door bell and waited.
Eventually the man of the house appeared as he opened one of the small windows in the door at shoulder height and I could hand him the envelope through an opening in the ornate metal grill guarding it. A tall and slender man in his eighties, careful in his gestures, bright eyes, a finely chiseled head.
When he heard I was from NTG, the huge door opened wide and I was welcomed in "because you're just the one I need!"
It turned out that since his computer died 1.5 years ago he's been stuck with most of his scientific work. He has worked on his manuscripts on a new laptop but first of all this Windows10 is much different from the Linux he used before and also Windows does not come with a pre-installed LaTeX system so the source files of his manuscripts cannot be compiled, viewed or printed.
I inserted the TeXlive DVD in his drive and started Siep Kronenberg's installer -- very happy it's there because otherwise I would have been stuck right at the start.
The installation took over an hour which happened to be good because it created the opportunity for us to have a long conversation in this large room with its high ceiling in the 19th century house. The semi-dark room so chock full of things from the past - paintings, antique furniture, books, boxes and dead old computers -- that it made me think of the final words of J.H. Leopold's poem "Cheops":
[...] hij is geboeid door de symbolen
van het voormalige en hij hangt er in.
van het voormalige en hij hangt er in.
(He is gripped by the symbols
of bygones and he is suspended there)
My host told me stories of his life in the science of theoretical physics and he explained many of his intrerests to me. For instance the Traveling Salesman Problem: can we define a method to always find the best possible route for a traveling salesman in any given area? He also explained his fascination for the Four-Color Theorem -- can one prove in a simple way that any map can be coloured with just four colours and no adjoining 'countries' having the same colour? Prime numbers and their varying distance from each other was another field of my host's keen interests. There were many books around with studies on these subjects and some of its authors he has known in person.
During his life he has at times been distracted by tangential tasks but these past years, he explained, while physically experiencing increasing limitations, his brain has arrived at a level of clarity he's never before experienced so he's very keen to get to work on his notes again.
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PS
John writes, from Phoenix: "Wonderful story. Good that his mail slot was for those with small ideas but the universe of ideas goes in frontally."
John writes, from Phoenix: "Wonderful story. Good that his mail slot was for those with small ideas but the universe of ideas goes in frontally."