![]() In that advertisement, two statements of educational principles attracted his attention. In a commencement address he gave there in 1987 (that was twenty years after his graduation), Thurston recalls that he landed in New College because, by chance, he read an advertisement for that college, amidst the large amount of literature which used to fill the family mail box every day. In 1964, he entered New College, a small private college in Sarasota (Florida). Thurston’s parents were wise enough to let him choose the college he wanted to attend after he completed his secondary education. We have included them as originally written, although there are a few minor discrepancies in some details pertaining to the description or the precise order of the events. All these contributions are collected in the second part of this article. Sullivan, after we showed him our article, proposed to include a text of his which previously appeared in the Notices, considering that his text is complementary to ours and would naturally fit here. Most of these colleagues responded positively and sent us a contribution, either in the form of a short article or as an email, everyone in his personal style and drawing from his own memory. We asked for the help of a number of colleagues who were involved in the mathematical activity “in the tradition of Thurston" that took place (and continues to take place) in France. Our desire to fulfill her wish was the motivation for the present article. In several subsequent phone calls with Laudenbach she insisted that this story needed to be told. ![]() She confessed to François Laudenbach that when she received the galley proofs of the article on Thurston which included her contribution, she was sad to realize that there was hardly any mention of Thurston’s influence on the French school of mathematics, and in particular on the Orsay group. Tan Lei was suffering greatly at that time her disease was diagnosed a few days later. One of Tan Lei’s last professional activities was the thesis defense of her student Jérôme Tomasini in Angers, which took place on December 5, 2014 and for whichĭylan Thurston served on the committee. Among the latter was our former colleague and friend Tan Lei, who passed away a few years later, also from cancer, at the age of 53. In 2015-2016 a two-part celebration of Thurston and his work was published in the Notices of the AMS, edited by Dave Gabai and Steve Kerckhoff with contributions by several of Thurston’s students and other mathematicians who were close to him.
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