Claudio Bunster: A personal recollection

When I met Claudio for the first time, by the end of the winter 1978, I felt I had known him for a long time. Indeed, I was quite familiar with Claudio’s remarkable work on classical electrodynamics, and he was a living legend among students and faculty at the University of Chile. At the time Claudio graduated, undergraduates were required to write a short thesis summarizing some topic and possibly including some experimental results. In his undergraduate thesis, Claudio solved an old open problem in a field where many old pros had tried their artillery before. This greatly exceeded the requirements for graduation and was in stark contrast with the scientific background of the country, where the great majority of university professors never published a single scientific paper in their entire life.