28-05 2020 10:35
wrote:
I met Renaud more than 20 years ago when Anna first brought him to visit us. By that point I had stopped living with Anna’s mother but was in a house very close by and we continued to live almost as an extended family. I have met up with Renaud many times over the years, most recently when I went to stay with Anna and him last year at their new place in Bures-sur-Yvette. This news came as such a shock it was nearly unbelievable. I shall always remember Renaud as a sparkly eyed happy and with an intense joy in life and ideas in physics. I am not a practicing physicist but I do have a degree in the subject, so for Renaud I was an almost student and he took delight in seeing how much I could understand. I recall one particularly intense conversation where he first explained the concept of diffeomorphism and then went onto explain why it was so much more important than most relativists realised and that they were missing part of the picture. This was the hard bit and I wish I could recall today what it was he found so particularly important. There can be something deeply poetic about mathematical ideas or words, and with his loss we have passed a boundary or discontinuity beyond which we cannot return: so unexpected and so sad.
28-05 2020 10:35
wrote:
I met Renaud more than 20 years ago when Anna first brought him to visit us. By that point I had stopped living with Anna’s mother but was in a house very close by and we continued to live almost as an extended family. I have met up with Renaud many times over the years, most recently when I went to stay with Anna and him last year at their new place in Bures-sur-Yvette. This news came as such a shock it was nearly unbelievable. I shall always remember Renaud as a sparkly eyed happy and with an intense joy in life and ideas in physics. I am not a practicing physicist but I do have a degree in the subject, so for Renaud I was an almost student and he took delight in seeing how much I could understand. I recall one particularly intense conversation where he first explained the concept of diffeomorphism and then went onto explain why it was so much more important than most relativists realised and that they were missing part of the picture. This was the hard bit and I wish I could recall today what it was he found so particularly important. There can be something deeply poetic about mathematical ideas or words, and with his loss we have passed a boundary or discontinuity beyond which we cannot return: so unexpected and so sad.
