Dear Oscar Benjamin,
I hope this mail will find you although I do not know your personal address. I was the first doctoral student and later a colleague of Kalevi Suominen at the University of Helsinki, so it goes without saying that I share your sadness and all the positive thoughts about him I find on the SymPy pages. Kalevi became a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters at the tender age of 33 years, and therefore the Academy will publish an obituary in due time, both in Finnish and in English. Most likely we have to wait for that until next year, and meanwhile I would like to write a less technical version to be published by the leading Finnish newspaper, possibly together with other students and colleagues of Kalevi. The problem is that I left the University of Helsinki decades ago, and thus I do not know how to get in touch with his children (his wife Pirkko passed away just a few months before he did). Legally speaking an obituary can be published without the consent of the family, but I find it polite to inform the family and I would also like to check some facts about Kalevi. In conclusion I'll ask you for a favor: could you be kind enough to send me the email address of Risto Suominen (by pm)? Yours sincerely Kaj Malm bkmmalm(at)gmail.com tiistai 26. maaliskuuta 2024 klo 15.13.00 UTC+2 gauravdhi...@gmail.com kirjoitti: > I feel really sad hearing that, he was my mentor in both the GSoC projects > I did with SymPy, it always felt really nice talking to him. He was the one > who sat down with me over gitter and helped me understand pdb (python > debugger) on terminal. Over the course of initial few years (2015-2017), we > often had some informal chats about his son visiting him, or what has been > upto currently, even his habit of not updating his ubuntu distribution (he > was on 12.04 LTS even in 2017). I never got the chance to meet him in > person, I really have some good memories of working with him, it just > breaks my heart to hear of him being no more. > > The last I spoke with him was in 2021, I wish I had somehow kept in touch > with him more often and visited him maybe. > > Because of a glitch in github, even today when I receive notifications > from github of comments made by someone else, it still shows to me that > those comments are made by Kaveli Suominen himself, doesn't matter what > repo it is, its been the case for me from the last 5 years (see screenshot > below): > > May he rest in peace. > > Regards, > Gaurav Dhingra > > > On Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 8:41:37 AM UTC+5:30 anderso...@gmail.com > wrote: > >> Hello All, >> >> This is very sad to hear for me. Being someone who worked with him for >> like 6 - 8 months (Oct 2021 - Apr 2022 while I used to contribute to the >> Series & Limits module and May 2022 - Aug 2022 while Kalevi was my GSoC >> Mentor) , I can say that this is a huge loss for the community. If you see >> my PRs from Oct 2021 to Apr 2022, almost all have been merged by Kalevi >> cause we were trying to solve some fundamental issues in the series module >> and the code for that was written back in 2008 - 2010, so it needed some >> special attention and refactoring. I always felt that his reviews on my PR >> were so spot on. >> >> This also led to my GSoC project where we tried addressing more relevant >> issues. I was in touch with him over chat for about 3 months on a daily >> basis, though sadly I never met him over video. I remember we used to >> brainstorm on approaches to solve an issue and as usual he had and approach >> and I had a counter approach which I felt would work out too. So I used to >> challenge him and he always gave me the freedom to try (and I think he knew >> I would fail) and then get back to his approach. Specially on this PR ( >> https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/23592) . This happened a couple of >> times after which I knew that whatever he says is backed by his experience >> as a SymPy developer and I shouldn't be challenging him. >> >> Hence being someone who got a chance to work with him closely, I can say >> this is huge loss for the sympy community. I know a couple PRs where Kalevi >> had an approach in mind and had mentioned it but nobody tried addressing >> it, for eg >> https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/25756#issuecomment-1864176011 . I >> shall try looking into this whenever I have time. >> >> Regards, >> Anutosh Bhat >> >> On Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 10:01:43 PM UTC+5:30 Oscar wrote: >> >>> Hi all SymPy community, >>> >>> It is with great sadness that I bring the news that Kalevi Suominen >>> (@jksuom on GitHub) passed away on the 4th of March. Kalevi's son >>> Risto passed on this news to me and some others by email yesterday. >>> >>> I never met Kalevi in person but we had many conversations online over >>> many years. Kalevi was an outstanding SymPy contributor and was >>> involved with the project long before me and so there are others here >>> who have known him much longer than I have. Kalevi guided many SymPy >>> contributors and supervised many GSOC students over many years. >>> Looking in the git history his earliest commit was from almost exactly >>> 10 years ago. >>> >>> Personally I learnt a huge amount from Kalevi and I am very grateful >>> for the time he took to teach me and others and to guide the project >>> generally. Kalevi's expertise in many areas of Mathematics and across >>> the full depth of many parts of the SymPy codebase was unmatched >>> within the community. >>> >>> Interacting through GitHub I guess that many of us did not realise >>> that Kalevi's health was in decline. He continued to be involved >>> including most recently reviewing a pull request just 6 weeks ago. A >>> few weeks ago he sent me some files with what he was most recently >>> working on but was no longer able to finish. I will try to complete >>> that work and submit it as Kalevi's final pull request. >>> >>> Kalevi's passing is a huge loss to SymPy but I don't want to dwell on >>> that. Instead I invite those of us who have known Kalevi to share >>> their thoughts and memories here. >>> >>> Oscar >>> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/ef2caca9-927c-4646-9690-848ae1a7a897n%40googlegroups.com.
