Markus MeisterDecember 1, 1975 - December 24, 1998 |
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Markus MeisterDecember 1, 1975 - December 24, 1998 |
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I just found out today that a really close friend of mine at brown died of a car accident on xmas eve... he was my partner in many projects, and is one of, if not the most brilliant person I know...
Markus is one of those guys not bounded by rules... he was going to be the first PhD student at Brown defending his thesis while wearing piggy tails and those ripped purple velvet pants. he's never slow on giving criticisms, and at the same time, he's never slow at giving a helping hand.
in the year and a half that I have known him, we have shared a lot of wonderful memories... starting from our CS258 project where we coded the single most swilly piece of program known to man because we refused to do the damn project with recursive function calls... we ended up staying up all night debugging our iterative loop and goto statements. during those coding nights we got into the habit of an occasional xevil duel which would last on for hours... trash talking was a must during those hours, and somehow he always managed to kick my butt.
his fascination with the Japanese culture led us to sample sushi at Little Tokyo, watch anime all night while drinking plum wine, and play playstation (specifically bushido blade) until the sun comes up.
and in a matter of seconds, we can no longer do any of these things together ever again. we had plans to write our first SIGGRAPH paper on automated painterly renderer with Caroline, finish up watching the remaining 17 tapes of kenshin in one night as a marathon, and we had planned to go to a little sea food store in east providence and buy a whole fish so that we can each sushi til we burst.
I kick myself for never having told him how much our friendship means to me. I never told him how much I admire him for his talents, and for having such a kind and gentle heart.
I guess I have always learned things from Markus... since the day I met him when Don, Chicken, Andy, Pascal, Spike, and I went to that pizza place on Thayer street for orientation. he's taught me to live the way I want to live, and always take on the most challenging things... and amazingly enough, he managed to teach me one last thing after he died. I learned that life is so truly short, I shouldn't let the little things bug me down, and I should treasure everything that I ever had.
so this is a letter to first apologize if I have not been in touch with each of you as much as I probably should have since I take each and everyone of you for granted. I want to apologize if I had ever been mean or said anything hurtful... and I want to say how each of you has played an importantly role in my life at one point or another, I will always be forever grateful for knowing you, and I will treasure every moment that we shared.
at the end, if you knew, I urge you to remember him for the wonderful person that he was... the times where he made us laugh during his presentations, or the times where he absolutely shocked us with his unique fashion statement... and here's my favorite quote from him regarding his 224 project with Dom on simulating smoke (which he would always kick me for if I say it in public):
"porting from 2d to 3d is just adding one extra 'd', how hard could it be?"
Mark DePalma
I would first like to express my regrets for not being able to be here
this afternoon. A conflict in teaching responsibilities had prevented
me from delivering this eulogy in person and I deeply apologize to
' family. I also extend my condolences to' family
and to the Brown community.
Each of us here knew, but we all knew him differently. If
had one defining characteristic it was his multi-facetness. I
am here to share with you some of these facets that I experienced
during my friendship with him.
As some of you may know, was an Epicurean at heart. In my
conversations with his friends from the University of British
Columbia, we have very similar stories in common and his fondness for
the culinary adventure quickly became his universal trademark. Quite
often, would go to Asiana, a market in East Providence, to
pick-up some wondrous ingredients for his concoctions. As one of his
friends aptly commented, would 'imagine some great way to
put all the ingredients together into a foreign feast that would go
down in legend.' And legend it quickly became.
I remember one fall evening the zeal with which he approached creating
a certain learn-as-you-go pasta dish. The culinary philosophy of
adding a 'pinch of this and a dash of that' reached new before
unseen heights. I remember seeing him standing at the stove mixing
creams, ricotta, red wine, rosemary, caraway seeds, and a few other
ingredients into a sauce that would make Julia Childs shutter. I
asked him what he was doing, and he responded, 'I'm making a
white cream sauce for my fresh pasta.' I also remember sitting at
my computer typing out a paper and looking up to see him standing
there holding two plates of his malodorous concoction. I also
remember the two of us delicately fertilizing the porch plants with
his Epicurean delight.
' zest for life's experiences did not end with cooking.
This past summer, went home to British Columbia, bought a car,
picked up his father, and drove from British Columbia down to New
Mexico across Texas, up to Utah and to Colorado, across Minnesota and
some 2,000 plus miles later, ended up back in Providence. Out of all
the tales spun around the metaphorical campfire, I remember one in
particular. The setting: moonlit night in a campground somewhere
in the Texas. Enter the cast of characters: Markus, his dad, two
sleeping bags, and a rather large, long brown and tan haired
eight-legged friend. would later write, 'It [the spider]
FREAKED me out!' Needless to say, sleeping arrangements were
modified that night.
and I learned a lot from each other. As I am sure you have
learned something form him. I believe life to be a journey where we
touch and are touched by one another's lives, affecting and being
affected by one another. has taught me to appreciate the
qualities in life. He would insist on dining out on Sushi at least
once a week, spend $90 on a pen, $40 on a dinner (if you are a grad
student that's a lot), or $400 on a bed. To, these things,
the little joys in life were well worth the price. I can hear him
hovering over my shoulder recanting his phrase that, 'you spend
one-third of your life in a bed, and you won't invest $400 into
your sleep, which in turn will make you a more productive graduate
student? Are you crazy? The beds at Brown will eventually cripple
you.' It was his looking past an object's bare utility that gave
him a certain depth and charm.
For all this, was a warm-hearted, good and kind man. He always
expressed a concerned for his fellow man. I was up one night preparing
4 trays of lasagna for a fellowship supper and around 11pm, he noticed
that I was never going to finish. He put aside his schoolwork, rolled
up his sleeves and pitched right in. It was because of his help that I
was able to finish cooking on time.
While writing this, I am reminded of too many moments to include
here. It is my hope that all of you at sometime or another will share
with each other your experiences with. We should not feel sorry
for. lived life the way that he saw fit to live it. He
made the most of every moment and the very fact that you are all here
today, proves that he in fact touched all of your lives. He was a man
for others.
In closing, I am reminded of two quotes. One is from Paul Reitsma, a
friend, writing about what he learned from' life. He said,
'sacrifice neither the present for the future nor the future for
the present, and :live life fully and without regrets.' The
second quote is by Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church who lived
in the 16th century. She said, 'There is no such thing as bad
weather. All weather is good because it is God's.'
I would like to take a moment of silence so that we may remember
in our own way. Thank you.
loved mathematical sophistication and complexity, indeed, he
sometimes loved complexity for its own sake. I had gotten him started
on looking at subdivision surfaces, and in particular I had him read
Jos Stam's papers on exact computation of limit points for subdivision
surfaces (in which he found and then corrected an error), but that
didn't seem to lead to any obvious further interest for him. I'd also
encouraged him when he expressed interest in taking the "Theory of
Manifolds" course in the mathematics department, even though it was
a graduate course intended for future mathematicians, not CS students.
As he began to learn about bundles, parallelizability, and frame bundles,
not to mention Grassmannians, I explained to him how certain user-interface
ideas could be described in bundle terms; in particular, Ken Shoemake's
"double the angle" virtual sphere rotation interface can be seen as a
"blowing up" of a singularity in the exponential map on SO(3), and
the notion of "motion by local frames" (i.e., controls that let you
"move in the x-direction that I carried along with me") having no
singularities can be seen as an explicit parallelization of a frame
bundle. I was delighted to see him not only grasp these things,
but apparently find the mathematics more transparent on account
of the graphics application.
My hope for his research was that he could take some of these
ideas (which are admittedly ill-formed in my mind) and extend them
to build new and better interfaces (we had talked about a twin-joystick
camera controller for viewing in 4-space, for example) for all sorts
of tasks. My guess is that having done some of that, he'd have
found some other problem that interested him, and to which topology
could be applied, and that I'd have been able to sit back and just
watch.
The last project that I'd gotten him interested in was an extended
axis-angle interpolation scheme, generalizing some work that I'd done
with some Caltech folks in 1991/92. The questions he asked, as I
tried to explain my ideas, showed me that I'd not thought through the
ideas nearly enough. In trying to formulate answers to his questions,
I've come to understand rather more about what I'd been thinking of doing.
That was one of the pleasures of working with: he knew a good
question when he saw one, and was never afraid to ask it.
In 295 was innocent, unconventional, excited, and entertaining.
His talk was about surfaces in 4D, and he gave some nice, intuitive
explanations, while conveying his high level of interest. He always
had good questions, often from interesting and unexpected
perspectives, for other presenters in the class.
One of my earliest memories of is when I went to take a picture
of him for the bulletin board right after I returned from NASA in Nov
1997. I hadn't had a chance to meet any of the new grad students yet so
I armed myself with the camera and went off in search of new faces to
capture on film. I remember first meeting him as he sat in front of his
terminal, with his bookcases and desks strategically placed as a buffer
from social contact. I thought it strange that a seemingly humorous and
intelligent guy would be so anti-social. He was personable one-to-one
but shied away from crowds, which in his definition was a group of more
than 2 people. I really wanted to meet him despite his reluctance to be
social so I made a point of stopping by just to see how he was doing or
giving him a hearty hello when I saw him. I considered him a friend and
was looking forward to the fact that as a PhD student, he'd be here long
enough for me to become really good friends with. I was just starting to
know how special he was.
I remember him most of all because he was so individual, not caring a
whit for conventions or expectations. He definitely did things his own
way. All my memories of him make me laugh, it's kind of hard to remain
sad at his death when every memory brings a smile. I remember going into
his office one night to see him sitting in front of the terminal eating
peaches out of a gigantic 64 ounce can! And I'm sure everyone remembers
the red velour pants, the silver shorts, the piggy tails, and the time
he had to go out and buy his first pair of real pants for SIGGRAPH. I
used to enjoy listening to him spar with Don about Conservatism,
Capitalism, and every other subject about which he felt strongly and Don
could manage to find just the way to goad him. I would pick on him about
the petrified wood in his office -- that is to say the cakes his father
would send to him that stood for a year on his bookcase, one piece
eaten. He would insist it was still good.
Shortly after got his Jaguar, I remember going with Don, Remco,
Greg, Brian, Brian's brother, and to the Slick Trak, a new
obsession for at the beginning of the summer. We wasted lots of
tokens on the video machines but the finale was the token gun in the
corner where you could shoot tokens up into the dragon's mouth and get
some tickets to later exchange for prizes. We depleted our token stock,
with trying to make all the hard shots to the furthest dragon and
failing miserably. I don't remember exactly what triggered it, perhaps
it was that Greg had a particularly lucky streak which shamed Markus's
quest for glory, but all of a sudden storms off and come back
with his pockets and hands bulging with tokens and a disgruntled yet
determined look on his face to BEST that machine at all costs! We all
laughed at his stanch defense of his wounded pride. Yet he managed to
win enough tokens for us to get a (broken) Chinese horn and a
superbounce ball and a few other cheap useless toys.
And he was always making off-color jokes. Though these may be crude
remarks for a memoir, I mention them only to show you that never
held anything back. When he first moved into his new apartment, he said
to me "Hey yeah, I just a new queen-sized bed. Wanna come see it?" And
when I was working on a project where I painted balls to look like the
planets, I went in to his office to see if Remco and he wanted to join
me in shopping for the balls. said that he had some spares that I
was welcome to. He was always quick with a joke and that little smile
and dumbfounded look he would get after saying it, as he rolled his eyes
mischieviously toward the ceiling and played with his beard, his fingers
twitching furiously beneath his crooked smile.
For his birthday just weeks before he died, Remco and I had cooked him
carrotcake cupcakes and stuck the most obnoxious colored candles in the
cupcakes as they sat in the tin, neon pink and green -- the girliest
colors we could find. We managed to get him to come to the office where
we accosted him outside his office door with a cakepan filled with
flaming cupcakes. Stan came around the corner and joined us in a very
off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday!" I can only wonder what
wished for before he blew out the candles.
I almost missed another chance to spend time with right after
that. I had convinced him to have me over for dinner and a Japanese
anime movie and I kept postponing it as stuff kept coming up. But he
kept asking when would be a good time, and finally we set the date. I
was super busy and almost canceled again, but I thank heavens that
something made me not do it. He was worried about his place not being
clean or comfortable or maybe it was just the entertaining thing, I
can't be sure, but he opted to eat and watch the movie at my house. I
showed up 45 minutes late, preoccupied by something, he was almost ready
quit waiting. I made a great salad, minus the tofu which he insisted was
the best food on earth, and he made the spaghetti, flavoring it with
every spice he could find (most of which he was quick to point out to me
that they were crap because they were old) as he mumbled under his
breath "We should have steak." I complained that I could never cook
steak right, and he promised we would do the dinner/movie thing again
and he would teach me how to cook it. And as he played master chef, he
ended up overestimating the olive oil, dumping so much into the sauce
that the red stuff was just sediment. All through dinner, he would get
that smile and smack his lips, saying "Umm, tasty, tastes just
like olive oil, can never have enough olive oil." Since Galina was
taping Babylon 5 that night, we ended up going to his apartment to watch
the movie and as we sat on his couch eating the last of the birthday
cupcakes, he said the nicest thing to me "That birthday celebration was
just the right amount of ceremony and just the right amount of people.
That was a great!"
It's a shame didn't like crowds because I wish more people could
have met him and be touched by his wit and candor. He always said what
was on his mind, often extremely critical thoughts but always truthful.
He didn't hold anything back. It was so fun to see him give
presentations after he'd been up for days at a time. Totally free form
and totally irreverant.
When I first heard that he was gone, I was in total shock -- a cold hard
lump sunk to the bottom of my stomach, I could feel the color evaporate
from my face. I remember thinking "Not again!" It was just a few years
ago, almost to the day, that I heard about Paris's death and I remember
having the same reaction "But I just saw him last week..." It's amazing
how there isn't any warning, no chance to tell someone that you care
about them, to tell them what they mean to you. You only have to hope
that they realize how important they were to your life. I'll keep
smiling at the memories...
Once we went to get boxes of soda from a bottling factory
1 hour from here. We were joking all along. Actually it was
me who was making fun of his car. I was saying that I couldn't
believe that he had paid so much for his car. Later I came
to know from Rahul (I am not very good at cars) that it was worth that much
despite the looks.
Rahul and his mother once invited and myself to a dinner.
Rahul's mother made fabulous dishes. I thought I was funnier than
normal that day. was saying that he never wore a watch.
Why should he? He had his workstation with a clock on it.
He said that once he and a couple of other guys ( I guess all
graphics guys) went to a restaurant and no one had a watch.
I said that was too bad. "Why didn't you take your workstation
along with you. If somebody asks say it's your watch".
told me that I was "onto something"!
I was leafing through some of the quizzes for CS295-1 last fall (they
were graded by students), and I noticed that one of Markus's was
marked "be serious." This was telling, because certainly
enjoyed his work here at Brown, and often had a unique perspective on
course material. A comment from my written feedback on his first
presentation reads:
"Presentation Style: good. The jokes helped to create a
comfortable atmosphere, and your interest in the material
energized the audience."
In this presentation, had tackled the difficult topic of
visualization of objects in high-dimensional spaces. One of the many
visual analogies he used in order to make this presentation easier to
understand was to the donut (torus), an edible and tasty 2D surface
embedded in a 3D space.
Well, I was talking to Remco on Thursday or Friday, and he told me the
hilarious "Toy Airplane Incident" story he was thinking of relating (if
he spoke). Fun stories about are very appropriate - he was a
very fun guy - but, for whatever reason, funny stories aren't the ones
that spring to my mind right now. The sort of thing on my mind now is
how, every now and then, would spontaneously say to me "Ahh,
today's such a great day!" It didn't matter what the day was like. In
fact, when I suggested such, he gently chided me - the greatness for him
lay not in the specifics of the day but in the fact that ALL days are
great.
I've recently received some photos from his dad in the mail, but I don't
have a scanner so I can't make them available in time for the memorial.
I'll see about making them available soon, though.
Also, there's some memories/stories on a memorial web page we're working
on over here (at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/7393/markus.html for
now).
>It is really hard to gather together memories of Markus because
>his hermitdom meant he made only a few close friends. While he was
Yeah, he never was Mr. Social. Even with that, though, it seems to me
he somehow managed to make more friends than most of the people I know,
myself included.
>alive, I considered myself a friend but now, I almost feel like
>I am promoting myself by offering to talk at his memorial, since
>I know I was definitely only just starting to get to know him.
It's hard to say. I think what matters may be how much you miss him.
Besides, memorials, at least to me, are about sharing our experiences
and remembering together so as to help each of us remember more and to
give support to lessen the pain each of us feels. Memories shared are
memories strengthened, while pain shared is pain lessened.
>I don't know exactly how close the two of you were, but I can bet
>you miss him too.
Yeah, very much. Both unfortunately and fortunately, we were very close
- he was probably my best friend and I think I was one of his. I think
the old adage "'tis better to have loved and lost" applies to friends as
well - if I'd known him less I'd hurt less now, but that's not a trade
I'd be willing to make. was too good of a person to forget.
Life's got to go on, though. Whenever I think of wallowing in grief, I
get a mental image of telling me how stupid that would be. One
of the main things I remember about is a real passion for life; I
think the best way I can honour his memory would be to try learning from
him and living my own life well.
