Some of you may recognize the title as that of a biography of Évariste Galois, one of my favorite mathematicians. He died tragically at the age of 21, hence the phrase, "He whom the gods love dies young".
This page is not about Évariste Galois. It is about a dear friend of mine, Markus Meister. Markus died equally tragically in a car accident after hitting some ice on Christmas Eve, 1998, shortly after his 23rd birthday.
I met Markus while at the University of British Columbia. We were both taking a combined honours degree in math and computer science and we were roommates for 2 of the almost 4 years we knew each other at UBC. During that time he introduced me to Unix and classical music. We spent most of our free time together developing what was going to be the world's greatest computer game. It never got far past the rough design phase, but some of our most memorable moments were spent during those sessions. When he left for graduate studies in computer graphics at Brown University, development slowed up quite a bit, but we still communicated our ideas daily through email. We planned to get together sometime after graduate school and finish it up properly. Now, that is not possible.
Here are some of the highlights of our time together. Hopefully it will help me remember, and it will help others get to know him a little better.
In closing, I am reminded of the words of a U2 song, "One Tree Hill":
I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill
Markus was one of those unforgettable people that everyone should have the honour of knowing. He was focused, hard working, and intelligent. Everything he did was a first class effort. We were lucky to know him.
Markus lived with passion, everything he did was a labour of love. His piano, mathematics, unix... everything was fired by a zest for doing things for their own sake. Markus was smart about how he went about it... he didn't just say "I want to be a high jumper, because I am passionate about it." he looked at his (quite considerable) abilities and choose to do the things that made him the happiest and that used his talents.
I, for one, was enriched by knowing him - his zest for life was infectious. For another cliche, he didn't just work hard, he played hard. He never seemed to waste his time - if he did it, he did it full force. Live life fully - good advice.
Rather than being unlucky in having lost Markus, we are lucky to have known him for the time we did.
For a start, we all remember the passion he brought to everything he did, be it work or play - remember the frantic math assignments, the B5 video marathons, the long MUD sessions, the bike trips or hikes, or even the short talks in the hall that took 2 hours? Sean put it well - with everything Markus did, he put in a first-class effort. That, I've learned since I met him, is the Big Secret to just about everything - effort. If I do something, I should give it my all; anything less is cheating myself. Something worth doing is worth doing right.
Also, he showed at least me the benefits of quality. Who can forget the $200 sunglasses or the $100 pen or the gourmet dinners or even the Sunday brunches? Before, price was my guide. For Markus, though, these things weren't just extravagances - they were expensive and they were worth it. Quality brings pleasure, and that's worth paying for. The realization adds a certain depth, somehow, to material considerations - they're not just for bare utility anymore.
For all this, Markus was a good and kind man. When I was moving from Totem to TBird, I had no food, no stove, no pots, and no time to get any of these. Markus didn't just give me something to eat, he prepared a seasoned and garnished dinner, and then watched me eat it - he said it made him happy to make a friend happy. Witness the grief we feel and consider the others who knew him, at UBC and at Brown. This is the pool of love Markus built up around himself by kind words and deeds. I never heard Markus spout the old cliche about virtue being its own reward, but I don't think he had to - he lived it. Can anyone look at all his good friends and say otherwise?
Even now, I have things to learn from him. Most present in my mind right now is the simple lesson that we all have our time and none of us know when. Sacrifice neither the present for the future nor the future for the present, and try to live life fully and without regrets.
I first met Markus in our first year of university. It was hard not to notice him. His fashion statements were the stuff of legend - the old T-shirts, the loose-fitting pants, and - of course - the hairdo he let grow until it began obscuring his eyes (and sometimes not even then). I didn't really get to know him, however, until our second year when I found myself in an honours math class with him. His passion for mathematics was obvious from the start. Even our professors were taken aback by his intense interest in finding general solutions to quintic equations and in postulating how a fourth-dimensional hypercube would look like on his computer screen. (He promptly wrote a computer program to do just that.) The following year we were roommates in a brand new university residence, along with two other friends. His style of living was, as we all know, unique. He extolled the virtues of haute cuisine. No inferior meat or vegetable would ever pass his lips. Of all the people I knew at university, Markus was by far the most adventurous in terms of trying out new things. Along with the squid stew, his other experiments included a big tub of lentil soup (which ended up sitting in the fridge untouched for two months) and some exotic sausages he picked up in Chinatown, which he seemed to enjoy even though everyone else found them vile. His personality also stuck with you. Markus never had any qualms about speaking his mind. While his bluntness was often disarming, and sometimes got him into trouble, after spending two years as roommates, I found him to be an extremely good and well-meaning person at heart, someone who just needed a little more practice dealing with people. His sense of humour was well-honed and did a lot to brighten my stay at UBC. His jokes were often self-depracating, and became his life preserver when he was faced with huge piles of assignments. "Hmm, did I put on fresh underwear today?" and "Did I have my shower this month?" were common themes when particularly big assignments were due. We also enjoyed watching late night TV as a quad. Babylon 5 became an instant fan favourite and his not-so-secret love affair with Delenn only added to the experience. When he left UBC for grad studies at Brown, we parted as friends. I kept in touch with him during the next year by email. He seemed to be enjoying his time there, even though the work was making UBC undergrad look like a piece of cake by comparison. The following year it was my turn to graduate, and in the summer I made a pilgrimage to New England to visit both him and a couple of other friends who were there. I got to see him in his "natural habitat", and followed him around on his big hunts through Japanese anime stores. In retrospect, that trip was one of the best and luckiest decisions I have ever made.
When I learned about his death, it hit me very hard, as I'm sure it did us all. To have one's life cut short at such a young age is unspeakably cruel, but reading the contributions from the people who knew him, both here and at Brown, has at least given me comfort that his life was not for nothing. His influences will remain with all of us. I wish that he could have continued on to do the kind of research that he always wanted to do. But sadly this was not to be. As long as we're around, however, some part of him will continue to exist, and this makes me much happier.