Journal

Last week I was in Utrecht for the conference «Dynamics and Hamiltonian Systems» in honour of Richard Cushman for his 65th birthday. It was definitely one of the best conferences I have ever attended. Richard has retreated to Saskatchewan since December 2005 and seeing him is now a rare pleasure. But what made the conference so good, except for Richard’s presence of course, was the speakers and a very interesting collection of talks.

I had the great luck of learning classical mechanics in a course taught by Nikos Voglis. He was then professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Athens and I followed his course as a second year student. He was an inspiring teacher and he commnunicated in the most skillful way the beauty and elegance of classical mechanics. So skillful, indeed, that after this course I knew that I wanted to work on classical mechanics from that moment on.

Monsieur Efstathiou a exposé son travail en français, avec beaucoup d’aisance et de manière remarquablement claire. Ses réponses aux nombreuses questions, parfois difficiles, posées par les membres du jury, ont montré son souci d’aller au fond des choses, et sa grande autonomie, confirmée par les membres du jury qui le connaissent bien. Son travail, aussi intéressant pour son contenu mathématique que pour les applications physiques, pourrait aussi constituer une excellente thèse de mathématiques.