Years of Teaching Collaboration with Gianni

I begin my contribution (actually, a brief contribution, Gianni would deserve much more) with a personal memory going back several decades, when Gianni, a third-year student, came to take the exam of my course of ‘Mathematical Methods of Physics’. Among the several thousand students I have examined in my long career, Gianni’s is the oral exam I still remember well. In fact, having checked that his written test was all correct, I had posed a rather challenging question to him. His answer was prompt, but with the use of technical terms far beyond the standard syllabus. I remember being almost annoyed by this and was led to think that he was the “know-it-all student” trying to impress the examiners by exhibiting big words he does not even know about. Then I tried to delve deeper into the subject and, to my surprise, I found that Gianni had perfectly mastered the topic, in which he moved with confident and correct language, even in depth, and with absolute naturalness (to be precise, the argument concerned Lie algebras, a topic that at that time was barely mentioned and only for a few simpler cases). Then, even as a student, Gianni demonstrated his characteristic gifts that we have all come to appreciate: a deep knowledge and enormous culture concerning any subject of physics and mathematics, together with a disarming naturalness in discussing them. Unfortunately, I never interacted with Gianni on matters of scientific research, but in return I established with him a legendary ironclad partnership of teaching collaboration.