| I cannot help but say how I miss Bill. I met Bill for the first time in 1986 at Dr. Charnes’ office in Austin. In 1993, Bill visited Aoyama-Gakuin in Tokyo where we agreed to write a textbook on DEA. I began to write the first draft in 1996 and the book was published in late 1999 from Kluwer under co-authorship Cooper-Seiford-Tone.
I will talk about something that happened during this publication. We exchanged a memorandum on writing this book. First, we agreed it should be a textbook but not a monograph. At that time we had no Windows and e-mail. So, I wrote the first draft in TEX and sent the DVI file as printed matter to Bill by airmail. It took about a week to reach Austin. Bill carefully read my draft and responded to me by revising it with his handwritten materials. It was a wonderful experience for me that, even if I wrote only a few lines on some subject, he expanded it to several pages! His sentences were long with no periods but with much ornamentation. When I was an undergraduate student, I read Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, in the Reclam book.
I wondered how the great philosopher expressed his thoughts through continuous long sentences in a multi-stratified manner. I felt the same surprise in Bill’s writing. I first leant to write such long sentences just like composing a symphony. Bill’s brain had a full of polyphonic structure. Moreover, his handwritten letters were difficult to decipher, as many acquaintances know. He said that when he was a schoolboy he was awarded in penmanship. However, after the invention of the ballpoint pen, he came to write speedily to express his flowing ideas one after another.
So, his cacography is caused by the ballpoint pen!
No words can express the deep sorrow I felt when I heard of his demise.
Kaoru Tone, Japan
June 2012 |
