Jon’s joy

I have many memories of Jon that make me smile. Some about his quirkiness, all about his joy and seemingly boundless energy. What I’d like to share now is my remembrance of his joy and focus on what inspires. When I first arrived in Burnaby for a year-and-a-half postdoc at SFU, I stayed in Jon’s garden house while I got oriented. I was always welcome in his house. I remember sitting in his dining room with Richard Crandall one evening. This would have been in 2003 when we were working on continued fractions of Ramanujan and utilizing a parallelization feature that Apple was developing for cluster computing. Richard started ruminating out loud about a conspiratorial plot against him by some competing colleague, as academics are known to do from time to time. Jon allowed him about 30 seconds of bellyaching before interjecting, “I have no time for that.” He then changed the subject to something much more enjoyable, like Ising integrals. That has stayed with me after sitting politely though what must now be tens of hours of other colleagues going on about petty grievances. Life is indeed too short for that.

I really will miss him. [Russell Luke, University of Goettingen, Germany]

Comments are closed.