May I introduce Professor Peter Schuster - The President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences?
    Christian Reidys

I actually picked up Prof. Schuster at the Beijing airport myself. You know that he was my Ph.D. advisor, a close friend and the President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

It was indeed very exciting to welcome him at the Center since he has internationally "the" strongest group in mathematical biology and is very active as a researcher. Of course, on the drive back he wanted to know "everything" and we had a lot to discuss.

I had let my students know that Peter would come to the Center around 6pm and when we finally arrived he was of course welcomed by Bill and later by my students who patiently waited to meet Peter in person. Peter was Impressed by the fact that on a sunday evening there were 13 students waiting for hours to meet him--in his words:"what a dedication"! In his view,this is the key element for success.

Just a few days ago, Bill received some very funny icons describing the Different philosophies of the German and the Chinese. This subtlty was even applied to the poster we made for his speech. The first version was very much a German small leader with big double helix graphics around him.

However, Bill made a serious change by enlarging the image of the man and Reducing the graphics on the side. It turned out that he looked much greater in the second edition reflecting the chinese way of representing a "leader".

Peter realized immediately that Bill and I work synergetically, he immediately realized how much respect my students had to him.

He told Bill a funny difference between Austrians and Germans: suppose you enter an office of a German scientist and catch him looking out of the window: the German will be embarrassed since he is not considered working.

However, this is not the case for the Austrian: he will be embarrassed NOT looking out of the window, since he is supposed to prove his results by "great ideas" which you can ONLY get by looking out of the window.

The next day he gave a terrific lecture integrating a decade of RNA research and pointing out perspectives and open "projects".

The Lecture Hall of the Chern Institute of Mathematics was packed with an audience of over 200 students and some professors. He was deeply impressed about the number of, in his words: "young" people who followed his lecture carefully.

Later he met president Rao and both presidents should become good friends during the following dinner. I was so surprised that during their conversations,the two presidents found that have many common friends in Germany and in Austria. As remarked by President Rao, the world is really small.

The next morning we had breakfast and he told me that he understood "why" I chose Nankai to start my group. The work-ethics and commitment he saw made an impression and in particular the close interaction between combinatorics and biology that happens at the Center.

于2007年11月29日