A tribute to Rainer Vogt

A tribute to Rainer Vogt

[Martin Markl]

     Dear colleagues

     As you probably already know, Rainer Vogt died on August 12, 2015,
after two years of battling pancreatic cancer. My Australian friends
though that it might be appropriate for me to write a short personal
tribute to him for your forum.

=======================================================

     The first time I encountered the name Rainer Vogt was during my PhD
study in Praha, when among randomly chosen books I was reading
appeared a Russian translation of Boardman and Vogt's "Homotopy
invariant algebraic structures on topological spaces." I did not
expect that this kind of structures would turn to be the central theme
of my professional career. I did not know who Rainer Vogt was either,
I only realized that, along with Rainer Maria Rilke, he was the only
person christened ``Rainer'' I knew.

     I met Rainer in person several years later, in 1998, when he
delivered plenary talks at the 18th Winter School ``Geometry and
Physics'' in Srni, a remote Bohemian village of Sumava Forest.  It
stricken me how he physically resembled my grandfather from the mother
side.  He obviously knew about my humble work on operads, and invited
me to participate in the "Workshop on Operads" in Osnabruck, in June
of the same year. I have been visiting Rainer regularly since.

     Rainer was not only an excellent mathematician, but also a devoted
amateur choir singer. Once I visited him shortly before Christmas. He
brought me directly from the train station to a church in
a neighboring village, where he sung in Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium. I sat
in the first row next to the priest who made frequent comments to me,
not realizing that I do not understand a word. Another day he brought
me to the house of his music teacher, where he rehearsed with some
other people. I vividly remember his performing, in German, an aria
from Smetana's Bartered Bride, a kitschy comic opera which is
considered a Czech national gem.

     I learned about his serious illness during my stay at the
Max-Planck-Institut fur Matematik in Bonn in Winter 2014. Together
with Michael Batanin and Clemens Berger, I visited him in a hospital
in Osnabruck, and then once again shortly after his return home. He
told me that listening to the record of Handel's "Theodora" I brought
to the hospital helped him greatly.

     He was full of optimism, willing to fight his fate. I have been
indirectly making inquiries about his health since, and was always
assured that he was doing well. I believed I would meet him again in
Bonn in January 2016. I was deeply shattered when I learned that
Rainer died a couple of weeks ago.

                              Martin Markl, Praha, 26th of August 2015




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