My first encounter with Godfried was when he visited CWI in Amsterdam
(for a sabbatical I think), around 1989. Mark de Berg and I took his
computational geometry class, after having taken the one of Mark
Overmars a few years before during our studies. While Mark's class
followed the book of Preparata and Shamos closely, Godfried's class was
more free and we learned a lot of new things.
A few years later I got to know Godfried a lot better, when I did my
postdoc at McGill University in 1992/1993. This was a very fun and
productive year. I got to work with many of the people at McGill and
nearly universities, including Sue Whitesides, Jit Bose, David Bremner,
Jean-Marc Robert, Hazel Everett, and of course Godfried Toussaint. I
remember that Jit, Godfried and I were working on a casting problem and
used an orange peel to understand what the geometry of the casting
problem was. It was a memorable year for me (in a positive way of course).
Many years later, in a furniture store in Utrecht that specializes in
modular book shelves, I was looking at the books they had standing in
the showroom to decorate their products. I was very surprised to see a
familiar book: Godfried Toussaint's Computational Morphology. It seemed
fitting to me, that such a book decorated the shelves of book shelves
whose geometry could be changed at will. I guess very few customers
realized how much this book had meant to the computational geometry in
the early days.
I will remember Godfried for the gentle person he was, and his great
interest in all research in geometry.
