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| Willem Kuijk-Grünbauer (former name Willem Kuyk) studied Pure Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Amsterdam and gained a D.Sc. degree with a doctoral thesis in Number Theory and Galois Theory, only with the wish to return to working in Applied Mathematics and the foundations of Physics later on. When employed by the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, Canadian job propositions guided him by way of a postdoctorate fellowship into an Associate professorship at McGill University in Montreal, that lasted eight years and ended with the decision to accept an offer by the Belgian Government to set up a department of Mathematics at the new Antwerp University. This decision jibed with his earlier proposal, made during a visiting membership at the IAS (Princeton) to J-P. Serre of the Collčge de France, to bring all the world's leading Number theorists and their Ph.D. students together into one Summer School, and then see what happens in the way of a rejuvenation of the number theoretic branches of Mathematics. This three week School by the name 1972 Antwerp Summer School on Modular Functions in one variable (with four Springer LNM proceedings) marked the beginning of the Mathematics department at Antwerp University, and, more importantly, it has been a stimulus to many old schools in Number Theory as well as to the establishment of new ones; to the point where it has been conducive to the solution of a series of long-standing conjectures such as de Fermat's Last Theorem, the Weil conjectures etc. Early retirement from the pure Mathematics area finally freed Kuyk's way to take up his interest in regulation systems in Biology (body heat and heart control) and the foundation of Physics (wave equations and questions regarding physical dimensions and the quantum theory of motion). |