The Professor

Everything about him was off-kilter and yet larger than life, even from his earliest origins. One of 14 children, he quickly learned that education was his way out of his indigent human condition. His conspicuous, yet grossly unconventional, character made him a friendly eccentric. He carefully programmed three graduate degrees along with a high-profile career in his life. Pedagogy, he believed, was the most important profession one could have. Endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, he solemnly consecrated his life to educating the next generation, protector of his future as he liked to call them. It was not long until he came to be unquestionably and uncritically venerated by his students. One could say they worshipped him not as a material effigy but like an ideal instance that becomes an embodiment of perfection. 

Often he lived in concept space, modelling roadmaps, developing the necessary tradecraft needed in his personal profile that would help him plan his next logical step in life. Someone once told him that all models are wrong, but some are useful. That struck a chord with him especially as the parametric space he breathed in continued to be challenged by the unknown unknowns. Clearly, the phase he seemed to be paused at was at its "to be defined" stage attending "analysis 101" class mapping all the what-if scenarios possible. Repository of what he knew versus what he didn't could be incorporated by the relatively new capability passively monitoring his knowledge base. Propensity to not know what you ought to know does not add value, however. He knew that. 

Now if one considered the different stakeholders in his life, one could imagine the pie in the sky and all the objects in the engineering problem space filling that pie. Linear thinking people, without ability to invest in creativity, people who are ongoing continuous projects or those who can be seen as finished projects. All of these players were forced to deal with stereotypes, inspirational possibility of things. He was their therapist, advisor, consultant, coach and teacher. He created ensemble of models boot strapping them while converting information to knowledge, all the while finding a home for their reference model in the n dimensional space. He, like his compatriots, knew, however, that people are not systems. If one can kill their frontal lobe, they probably can be managed. Accepting this and moving forward was his way of achieving a new business model plugged away from his past. His blood brothers, defunct creators, and his state of little or no material possessions were now all part of his past, the dry and tedious past that had plagued him. He realized that fate had exhumed him from this state vector to assemble one of the largest bodies of mathematical data in human history. Believe it or not, his larger than life tendencies and runaway libido might well have been responsible for the science of abstraction and logic seeking out patterns in systematic study of shapes and motions. 

You may not know him by name or face but you have seen him and will continue to see different versions of him in years to come. He will cease to exist one day, but his legacy won't. You will seek his wisdom and be exalted by his genius immortality. And when you finally accept his presence, you will come to believe on the basis of indefinite ground the strength of the impact he has had on your human condition.