(For the past four days I was in Delft, the Netherlands taking part in a celebratory event)

In the US, as the saying goes –“professors are dime a dozen”. When a professor retires, the department may honor him/her with an announcement and a parting gift at the annual department dinner. That is it. Any celebration or event are basically privately sponsored affair by the friends and former students of the professor involved (For example, see my blog article http ://www.sciencenet.cn/blog/user_content.aspx?id=3498 ). However, many European countries, the Netherlands in particular, still follow the custom of only one professor per subject. The professor heads a group consisting of docents, lecturers, readers, and assistants (roughly equivalent to associate and assistant professors and research assistants in the US). The installation and retirement of such a professor is a big event for the institution particularly if the person is internationally known. My friend and colleague, Professor Geert Jan Olsder of the Delft Technical University is retiring this year and the University had a two day celebratory event organized (Nov. 13-14^th 2008). 12 speakers from Russia, France, Australia, Swissland, the US, as well as native Holland were invited to give speeches (I was one of the 12) at a symposium. A public farewell lecture by Professor Olsder and speeches from top University officials were given in a big auditorium followed by receptions for hundreds of invited guest. The Olsders gave an exquisite dinner for invited foreign guests in Delft’s best known French restaurant (http://www.levieuxjean.nl/). The University also gave a dinner of over 100 guests the next day with speeches and gifts galore. Although Dutch was spoken by many speakers and at official events, They printed English translations for our benefit. All in all, a most celebratory two days.

 

Professor Olsder is known of his best selling book (in third edition co-authored with Professor Tamer Basar of the University of Illinois) on dynamic games and his successful application of max-plus algebra to optimize the Dutch national railroad time table. He spent one sabbatical year with me at Harvard in 1979-80. And we jointly authored the paper - Y.C. Ho, G.J. Olsder, and P. Luh, “A Control Theoretic View of Incentives” , Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes on Control and Information Sciences , No. 20, Dec. 1980, pp 359-383. Since then our research interests diverged somewhat but our families remained in touch. He was at my retirement party in 2001. Similarly, I met many colleagues from France, Russia, Australia etc whom I interacted two or more decades ago in game theoretic work at this symposium. It is nice to renew acquaintances again.

The Netherlands, or more popularly known as Holland, is a small but prosperous country of 16 million. Most Chinese first came to know her from the story of the small boy with his finger in the dikes to stop seawater from flooding the land. Next to the British, it owns more US assets than any other nation (e.g., Shell Petroleum). English is almost universally spoken. Delft is both a historical (The royal family lives in the Hague but are all buried in Delft), and a university town about 40 minutes by train from Amsterdam, the capital. In the US, it could be considered as a suburb of Amsterdam (like Lexington is from Boston. People commutes to Amsterdam from Delft ) Bicycles are everywhere. There are more parking lots for bicycles than for automobiles. Very GREEN!

Here included below are photos taken during my four days in Delft.

A cathedral in Delft started by the Catholics (bottom part in red color) and completed by the Protestants after they won the war (the second level in white) some 600 years ago and the effect of pollution of the third level because of a more porous kind of marble was used.

Many more photos taken by Prof Alain Haurie of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) of the event can be found at

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/igj8ZyRMVMtluenj8CRJig?authkey=26K1g7JLjMk