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Grzegorz Rozenb erg Professor G. Rozenb erg received his Master and Engineer degree in computer science in 1965 from the Technical UniversityofWarsaw, Poland. In 1968 he obtained Ph.D. in mathematics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Since then he has held full time p ositions at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, State University of New York at Bu alo, U.S.A., and UniversityofAntwerp, Belgium. Since 1979 he has b een a professor at the Department of Computer Science of Leiden University, The Netherlands, and an adjoint professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, U.S.A. Professor Rozenb erg was the President of the Europ ean Asso ciation for Theoretical Computer Science EATCS, 1985-1994, and he is currently the chairman of the Steer- ing Committee for International Conferences on Theory and Applications of Petri Nets. He has published ab out 300 pap ers, edited ab out 30 b o oks, and written 3 b o oks. He is the editor of the Bulletin of the EATCS, the editor of the series Advances in Petri Nets Springer-Verlag, and a co-editor of the Monographs in Theoretical Computer Science Springer-Verlag. He has b een a memb er of the program committees for practically all ma jor conferences on theoretical computer science in Europ e. He is also involved in a numb er of externally funded research pro jects on b oth national and international levels. He is a foreign memb er of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, a member of Academia Europaea, and he holds a honorary do ctorate of the Universityof Turku, Finland. The Magic of Theory and The Theory of Magic I will recall here, and re ect up on, the places I have b een, the events that Ihave witnessed or participated in, and the p eople that I have met. I will not 228 Rozenb erg discuss in any depth my ideas ab out science, or technical asp ects of my scienti c work, since they are explicitly or implicitly visible in my pap ers and b o oks. Warsaw, Poland I have received my basic education in Warsaw, Poland. The high scho ol I at- tended had as usual bad teachers and go o d teachers; as a matter of fact the bad teachers were in the ma jority.I have always had a bad memory and this has determined manychoices in my life, like, e.g., the choice of topics I did likein scho ol and those that I didn't. For example, we had a bad teacher of chemistry, and moreover it seemed to me then that the main aim of the chemistry classes was to memorize dicult names of molecules and comp ounds. Thus, I did not likechemistry at all. On the other hand, we had a fantastic teacher of mathe- matics, and at a very early stage I realized that you don't have to remember things in mathematics b ecause you can deduce \everything". Thus mathematics has b ecome one of my most favorite topics. I also did likevery much literature and p o etry. I wrote p o etry during the high scho ol and during my studies { most of it is lost bynow. Some of the b o oks that I had b een reading when I was in scho ol, were b o oks that were not available in Poland after the war, for example westerns. The way to get these b o oks and to read them was very memorable. You could b orrow such a b o ok or a hand written copy of it for a sp eci c p erio d of time, and then you had to rewrite it by hand. You had to return the b o ok to the owner, but in this wayyou were in a p ossession of the manuscript that you could read several times, and moreover you could exchange it with other b oys for their manuscripts. I surely rewrote many b o oks during myscho ol times. I had two passions during the scho ol. One of them was playing cards, and the other one was fencing. Playing p oker was very p opular after the war in Warsaw. You had to pay with cash, or with some of your valuable p ossessions like pocket knife, or a key ring. I rememb er that I could not concentrate on a poker game, b ecause when I would get ve cards into my hands, I would start thinking ab out various arrangements of the cards so that something \unusual" would happ en. This must have b een very annoying to my co-players, and so I was excluded from playing poker. However, I have b een inventing some nice tricks with cards, and at some p oint I started to show them to my friends. Then I regained their resp ect b ecause I could do something that none of them could. I rememb er b eing very proud of this. Already at the b eginning of the high scho ol I was accepted into a fencing club. Fencing b ecame my most favourite sp ort. One should know that in the '50s and in the '60s Poland was one of the very top countries in the world as far as fencing was concerned. I had b een lucky to get into the hands of a trainer, a Hungarian by origin, who was also the trainer of the national team. He was very encouraging towards me, and so I must have b een really go o d. I remember that one of the unpleasant consequences of b ecoming a student, after the high The Magic of Theory and The Theory of Magic 229 scho ol, was the choice b etween studying and fencing, which I had to makeifI wanted to b e go o d in either of the two. Fencing was very useful for me b ecause Ihave often walked in Warsaw in the evening with a stickinmy hand, whichI could use to defend myself if attacked by some thugs. As a matter of fact, this has happ ened several times, and I could defend myself quite well. Yet another passion of mine was dancing, whichwas quite natural b ecause it has also involved the fo otwork which is so imp ortant in fencing. Later, during my studies, I was working in a jazz club and in a student club, where dancing was the main activity; dancing jazz or ro ck and roll was considered very co ol then. I decided to study electronics b ecause it lo oked to me likea very nice way of combining physics and mathematics on the one hand and the technology on the other. At that time, the word \electronics" was synonymous with the most mo dern technology. The study of electronics was very p opular and so the entry exams were very comp etitive { only one in ten candidates has b een admitted. The entry exam was really hard. A big part of the study of electronics was very interesting, but there were a lot of classes, esp ecially in the rst half of the studies, that were totally useless in any sense, and taughtby totally unintelligent teachers. I did however enjoy many classes { the mathematics and physics programmes were very go o d, and I liked very much information theory, design of electronic lamps and transistors, electronic circuit design, analogue computing, and all kinds of lab oratories. The Soviet Union was the biggest pirate in the market of translation of b o oks { they were translating many b o oks published in the West without any p ermission whatso ever. That must have b een awful from all legal p oints of view, however it was wonderful for Polish students and scientists. We could buy trans- lations of all kinds of scienti c b o oks published in the West and this was the only access to these b o oks we had. I still rememb er the joy of buying such b o oks and starting to read them in the b o okstore already. Obviously we never knew that pro ducing these b o oks bySoviet Union was illegal { it was axiomatic that everything that Soviet Union did was legal and admirable. Ihave b een a big lover of theater and during the studies I even organised a So ciety of StudentFans of Theater { I rememb er that quite many times we, the students from the so ciety,were in the big ma jority in theater. There were many terri c actors in Warsaw, and very often a p erformance, of even a classic play, was a symb olic protest against the system { the audience always knew that! What was really great during these years in Poland were jokes. Jokes formed a natural survival to ol in the system of total arrogance and stupidity. It was quite dangerous to tell go o d jokes { but one always knew with whom one could exchange them. As a matter of fact, the b est jokes were the p olitical ones { here is one. \The biggest factory in the world was built in one of the communist countries. Many visitors are coming to see it. A very proud mayor of the city where the factory was lo cated is driving one of the imp ortant visitors to the factory. When they arrive at the entrance gate, the mayor says: \This is the biggest factory in the world, it employs ab out 15000 p eople".

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