This Is How It Is

On the evening of July 24th 2012, Rob Seymour died, after a long illness, at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead. Rob was Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at UCL, a colleague, collaborator and friend. The title of this post was the heading of a bulletin on his declining health, forwarded by a colleague. It succinctly captures, dare I say it, the human condition and the inevitability of loss.

I admired Rob greatly, and learnt from him. Just before his relatively recent retirement I had approached the then Head of the Department of Mathematics, a witty man of few, carefully chosen, words. I put the case for a replacement for Rob and asked for somebody who could aspire to the role he played. He looked at me wryly and said "but what you want is a Department of Useful Mathematics" (I cannot reproduce the Russian accent). That was Rob, a useful mathematician. I say this as a high accolade, and with respect and admiration.

Rob was a superb mathematician, with a fluency and technical grasp that spanned a very broad range. He had started his career as a pure mathematician but when we first worked together he had established himself as an applied mathematician. What distinguished him however, was not his immense skill but the fact that he was interested in -your- problem. He was modest, never showing off, he deployed the full force of his very considerable intellect on finding the most direct way to understand and address the matter at hand. His greatest ability was in knowing how to simplify complex problems, to build models. This is the characteristic of the best computer scientists and engineers, and he possessed it in a greater degree than anybody else I have worked with. Rob understood both intuitively and intellectually the process of modelling and was able to apply it. He was an excellent collaborator, open, questioning, supportive, ready to learn.

A few years ago Rob and I travelled together to the US in a speculative attempt to develop a collaboration in physiological modelling. He was a wonderful companion, relaxed and engaging. When we sat down to discuss the matter at hand however, he was instantly focussed. Politely, but insistently, he exposed the core of the challenge, teasing out of the experimental data the key questions and formulating them in terms that made it both amenable to mathematical and computational modelling and to understanding by the physiologists.

I will miss walking into the Senior Common Room and seeing Rob. I will miss the arc of our discussions that moved from the personal to the scientific, that were challenging and enlightening. I will miss his advice and his humorous take on the absurdities of university life. This is how it is.