Thank You — Erhard

Abstract

My first meeting with Erhard was in the autumn of 1979, when he arrived in Tbilisi as a guest of the Academy of Sciences of Georgia. The reason for the invitation was the intersection of interests in mathematics we had found in the preceding years. V. Kupradze, the chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Physics, supported this visit (they had met before during a GAMM conference and also at the International Conference on Function Theoretic Methods for Partial Differential Equations organized by Erhard Meister, Norbert Weck and Wolfgang Wendland at Darmstadt in 1976). It was the starting point of a long friendship and collaboration. During the stay in Tbilisi, Erhard showed himself to be not only a strong mathematician (he gave several excellent talks there), but also a strong adept of Georgian traditional meals: he was definitely ranked a Long Distance Runner in the competition of proposing traditional Georgian toasts inspired by the taste of Georgian wines.