The Games of His Life

Abstract

I met first time Gheorghe Păun (G.P.) when he was a student in my class of mathematical linguistics. This happened 1973, at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bucharest. Despite the fact that I used to challenge the students with all kinds of questions, G.P. liked to remain silent during classes. He preferred to write down the solution, bringing it to me privately a few days later, instead of answering aloud, in the presence of all his colleagues. Later I realized that this is characteristic of the man; even today he is a little shy and his natural gift is more for research and less for teaching; to be more exact, we should say that his gift for teaching is more visible in his published works than in his spoken presentations. Many scholars have claimed that their way of researching was always via teaching. This seems to be the general pattern. A famous example in this respect are the great French mathematicians (like Cauchy) in the 19th century, most of whose results appear in their textbooks. G.P. does not belong to this pattern, but to its opposite. His lectures, impregnated with suggestive ideas, metaphors and humor, are a result of his research activity. This is one of the reasons G.P. avoided teaching activities, although he spent many years at the University of Bucharest.