more thoughts from friends ...#
Explaining some deep concept in easy terms...
His open mind attitude has always been extremely encouraging: always willing to listen, to understand, his curiosity gave him a very “young” and “fresh” attitude towards knowledge.
Philosophically almost naive, he always stuck to strong formalist vision and practice, anchored to a rare intuition for formal computations. Corrado always could and still can “see in advance” the dynamics of symbolic computation. I always loved to compare his peculiar mathematical intuition to the one of his dear friend, Ennio De Giorgi. Ennio and Corrado shared a long lasting experience in a mathematics institute in Rome (De Giorgi was one of the main Italian mathematicians of the last 50 years). Their philosophies of Mathematics were radically opposing: Ennio was an extreme Platonist (in a coherent relation also to his strong religious commitment). In their lectures, Ennio could show, by gestures and transferring insight, the “truth” and the “objects” of mathematics, Corrado could communicate the passion for the formal computation, the insight for evolving structures of terms. I was so lucky as to grasp from the lessons of them and, most of all, to learn the scientific a priori of an open ended, always renewed, largely unpredictable branching of the scientific quest.
Giuseppe Longo
I met Corrado around the mid-eighties, first as a student in his course and then having him as supervisor of my thesis.It was during the development of my thesis that we started trading via modem the chapters I had written and his corrections. This activity went on for years and this is, more or less, the way it worked. Corrado would call me, we talked about what we had been working on, and, in case there was something written about it, we would decide to send it. Thus began a sort of hurdle-course whose first step was that of establishing a connection between our modems. This had to happen simultaneously, so we would give ourselves a start and within seconds we were to commute from telephone line to modem, moving the appropriate lever. At this point we could no longer communicate ad would have to sit and watch the transfer bar move slowly until the file was transferred. It could take minutes to transfer a few lines of text, often enough time to go and make some coffee and smoke a nice cigarette.Just as often the line would break and we had to start all over again.At the end of the transfer the receiver would go and check whether the file was ok, which always caused quite some surprise and emotion. These sessions could be endless, or occur multiple times in a day. Sometimes we would thus spend whole evenings, to the disappointment of his family I suppose, who would by the way also lose access to the telephone line. One day I realised that Corrado would try never to call at certian times, and I understood those were the times when he was watchin Capitol, a V Series he wouldn’t miss. I took advantage of this to ask him not to use the modem during football matches.
Adolfo Piperno
