Thank you, Tomas!

Excerpt

I met Tomas Björk in 1983 when I moved to Stockholm (from Kentucky) to finish my PhD in systems theory at KTH, where he had completed his in nonlinear filtering a few years earlier and had taken up teaching duties (he was a wonderful teacher: he even won the award for best teacher of KTH). He was, like most Swedes, very nice and polite, but also very reserved. I soon realised, though, that he had a very pronounced and gentle sense of humour, and that is probably why, after a few months and with the help of a few beers, we eventually became friends. Soon enough, I was having dinner at his place every month. We would talk, solve the world’s problems, listen to music, play chess, and once I discovered he was very good at magic tricks (it was the same talent for capturing people’s attention he displayed in his wonderful lectures). Once or twice he made me listen to Tannhäuser, by Wagner, which I did not really appreciate at the time. Now that I have become a regular and enthusiastic opera-goer at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, I realise that I partly owe this passion to Tomas. He definitely liked pasta (amatriciana, carbonara, with pesto), which, being Italian, I could prepare in profusion at my place in Wenner-Gren. I remember that during one of those dinners, he asked me my opinion on how much to charge for his first consulting, since he was afraid to look greedy. I immediately lectured him on the teachings of the founder of the Italian communist party, Antonio Gramsci (who was a cognitive psychologist ante litteram), who maintained that, in order to make people read and value political propaganda, you had to charge a lot for it, and I claimed that the same applied to consulting. Apparently, it worked … …