Appendix a Curriculum Vitæ

Appendix A Curriculum Vitæ All my life I have been in education: as a student, as a teacher, as a researcher. An account of my life may therefore naturally be divided into periods corresponding to the institutions of learning where I have been active and the people I met there. Early Years (1936–54) I was born in 1936 in Skövde, a small city in the southern part of Sweden. Between the ages of six and ten I lived in Stensele, a village of a few hundred inhabitants in the North on the Ume river. My parents were both apothecaries—my mother no less than my father—and in order to obtain a royal privilege to operate an apotek (roughly, a big pharmacy) my parents had decided to try a part of the country where no member of our family had ever been before. My first school was of a type long since abandoned: in each class-room there were two classes each covering one of two consecutive years and both taught at the same time by one and the same teacher. Thus one teacher had years 1 and 2, another had years 3 and 4, and yet another had years 5 and 6. It was not a big school: three teachers and altogether certainly fewer than one hundred children, including a substantial number of children from even more isolated villages. (The teacher for the years 3 and 4, Margareta Ljunglöf, was the aunt of Lars Svenonius who, much later, was to teach me recursion theory in Uppsala (before ending up at the University of Maryland).) In 1946 I was sent down the Ume river some 200km to Umeå, the city on the Baltic where that magnificent river ends. This was necessary in order for me to receive my secondary school education, in those days reserved for the privileged classes. It was far from home, but I was well taken care of by a family. with whom I was lodged. Then my parents moved with me, my brother and my sister to Kiruna in the Far North where my father had applied for and been given a bigger apotek. Kiruna, politically one of the reddest cities of Sweden, was a mining town of, what can it have been?, some 10,000. Here we belonged in the bourgeois class along with doctors (and one veterinarian), lawyers, teachers, engineers, clergy, army officers. R. Trypuz (ed.), Krister Segerberg on Logic of Actions, 301 Outstanding Contributions to Logic 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-7046-1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 302 Appendix A: Curriculum Vitæ Our next door neighbour, a colonel, was the commander of the famous Jägarskolan, an elite regiment specially trained for warfare in the high mountain area. In those days only some 5 % of the population would send their children to what was then called läroverk (high school), something that created a certain tension with the other children; there were areas of the city I would be afraid to visit on my own. The adults seemed unaware of this: to them the city was safe, but for me, as a child, it was not. It always surprised me that one of my socialist friends would often speak, with expectant relish, of the day when the Revolution would come and I and my family would be dealt with. (Yes, he is still a friend; it is hard to explain.) Kiruna is situated about one hour by train north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays it is possible to drive all the way across the mountains to Narvik in Norway, but in those days the road ended in Kiruna. But, thanks to the mining industry, the railway to Narvik was already there (something that was important during the Second World War). In the summer there are some thirty days when the sun never sets in Kiruna, and in the winter equally many days when it never rises. Actually I did not experience the mid-night sun that much since my family would spend most of the summer school breaks in the south of Sweden. In those days one didn’t fly; train was the only possibility. The journey would take up to 30h—twenty-four to Stockholm, then change trains. Kiruna was an isolated place. For me, those summer months were a lifeline to civilization. This division between normal life most of the time and privileged life during a limited periods was somehow reflected later in my studies and my career. I had decided early on that I was going to become an astronomer; I owned a couple of books on astronomy which I read and reread. But then music came into my life when at twelve or thirteen I was given a violin by my parents, and a couple of years later a piano. It took me a long time to realize that my playing would never amount to much: I had started too late. (Much later the importance of starting early was brought home to me when I sat in on a course at Stanford with Paul J. Cohen, the Fields medallist: he and some friends had started a Club for Group Theory while still in high school.) Military Years (1954–56) In 1954 I graduated from high-school. In those days military service was compulsory in Sweden. I was “sentenced” to 15months with the coast artillery, but I actually ended up doing 2years. The additional 9months, by my own free choice, were spent at the Royal Swedish Naval College outside Stockholm. I didn’t much mind the military training. Perhaps it was even good in some respects: it may have induced a modicum of discipline in a rather immature young man. On the other hand it may have been a liability when much later I became Head of a Philosophy Department. There is of course something one may call intellectual discipline, but military discipline is something else. Academics are not good at taking orders! Appendix A: Curriculum Vitæ 303 Undergraduate Years (1956–59) Uppsala I. With military service finally over, Uppsala was next. What I remember most from my first year at that venerable university (founded in 1477) was the loneliness. The math courses I followed were mainly delivered ex cathedra and taken by over 300 students. The teachers were good, no criticism there. But the way things were set up in Swedish universities (and still are) one normally takes one subject at the time. Thus the only students I met were other math students, most of them first-year students like myself. I don’t know if math students are different from other students, but for me it was not a good year. Perhaps it was I who was not very good at making friends. In any case it was a god-send when one day I ran into a girl who, full of enthusiasm, had just returned from a year on a scholarship in an American college. It would be easy for me to get one too, she said: just write to the Sweden America Foundation. Which I did. The result: a scholarship at Columbia College. I could not believe my luck! Columbia. So I spent the following 2years, 1957–59, at Columbia, getting my B.A. in mathematics (or A.B., as it is called at Columbia). The scholarship was actually given for as many years as it would take to get my degree, but I decided two would be enough. I now think that that may have been the wrong decision: I should have accepted to enter as a sophomore and got 3 years. But I thought I was already getting too old. I spent my first week at Columbia as a chemistry major. But when I found out how much lab work was required for a degree in that subject, I changed to physics where it would be possible to stay theoretical. The two physics courses I took that fall semester were interesting and well taught (one of the professors was a Nobel Prize winner!), but for some reason I decided to switch once more, this time to mathematics. Of the professors in the math department I fondly remember two older gentlemen, de Lorche and Kolchin. (From the former I learnt the definition of a compact topological space: one that can be policed by a finite number of arbitrarily near-sighted cops.) Yet another interesting professor was Serge Lang, whose personal teaching style was enjoyable but demanding; at least I found it quite a challenge. At Columbia I studied not just mathematics: in order to get my degree I also had to fulfill a number of general requirements. The ones I particularly liked were a 1year sequence of literature/fine-arts/music and a 1year course in what was called Western Civilization, a course for which Columbia College is famous. Both courses were excellent, but the one that I found particularly interesting was the latter. The Western Civ readings were all original texts, from the Greeks through the ages up until the present, including not only philosophers but also people like Darwin, Weber, Toynbee, Freud, Marx and even Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. The pace was horrific: one author a week. (Homer one week! Plato one week! Aristotle one week! …) I remember later telling one of my Swedish philosophy professors about this; he shuddered. Why not rather one semester per author? The answer is of course that by doing it the Columbia way we were dragged through a lot of material that we may never have come across otherwise—this way we would at least become aware 304 Appendix A: Curriculum Vitæ of it and so be able to re-visit it if there was ever a reason to do so.

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