Fastelavnsboller

Thanks to Eeehmsen, we kept our blood sugar high at IMADA this afternoon. He treated the Semi-Academic Cake Club with home-made fastelavnsboller. The sort of traditional sweet cakes that Danes eat around start February when celebrating Fastelavn.

Image courtesy: Wiki commons

Visiting Odense

After a weekend of eating lots of cake (yes, I mean lots, but I also went running 10km yesterday to make up for (some of) it), I am now in Odense, visiting Lene for a few days. Quite a homely feeling to greet everyone at the Department of Mathematics and Computer science again, but rather strange to sit in the office of Edmund. They only just removed the last books from the shelves last Friday, and the dust is still firmly settled on the shelves ... and Wednesday there will be cake in the semi-academic cake club as usual.

Edmund Christiansen

He was the first person I talked to about the bioinformatics study in Odense. He approached me enthousiastically and said that if he had to choose a study today, he would choose for bioinformatics rather than mathematics. This was in the spring of 2002. He gave me a handfuld of notes on his course DM01 "structured programming" which I worked through meticulously before I started my first courses at SDU in the autumn of 2002.
I never had the pleasure of following one of Edmunds own courses, or do a project with him, but I did experience his lectures once in a while ("Numerical Analysis" and "Game Theory"). He was always the one to come up with fun examples of how to use mathematics and logical theory in real life problems, while never missing out on the facts or details.
When I met him occasionally at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA) he would always ask to how things were going with my study and maybe talk a bit about bioinformatics in general. He always showed a genuine interest for the projects I described to him. I once went to his office (was it maybe with Uffe?) to ask him about some method in numerical analysis. He spent half an hour or an hour explaining to us - happy to have us come by and clear things out so we would not only understand but also learn to appreciate the theories of numerical analysis.

He was the only member of the cake club who did not bake the cakes himself, but insisted on bringing cakes baked by his wife. At the annual christmas party at IMADA he was always one of the greatest entertainers, not holding back the urge to sing out loud or wear a false tie. He was one of those personalities that you would not be able to imagine without IMADA, just as you would not be able to imagine IMADA without Edmund. There is a big emptiness at IMADA where Edmund used to be. He will be greatly missed by everyone. My deepest condolences go to his wife and children.

Edmund Christiansen lost his life by drowning on October 16th, 2007 while on vacation in Italy.