I was born in 1958 in Stockholm as the second of five siblings. After Swedish grade school and high school I went to the University of Rochester in upstate New York as a freshman in the academic year 1975-1976, with a one-year scholarship from the Sweden-America Foundation and the Institute of International Education. I took math, physics, and computer science courses at the U of R, as well as philosophy, psychology and anthropology. Besides having a great time both intellectually and socially, this year gave me an opportunity to consider whether I should start studying mathematics at the University of Stockholm or engineering physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
I chose the latter, to a large extent since it appeared more socially appealing. After several years of satisfying student life, interrupted by then mandatory Swedish military service and the odd exam, I found myself with a Master of Science degree (civilingenjör). However, I had no intention of using this degree to apply for a job at some company. My academic interests had been oscillating between mathematics and physics for the past few years, after being more oriented towards logic and computer science as I came back from the USA a few years earlier. In my last two undergraduate years, I opted for the ”applied mathematics” major, which included various required courses in optimization, probability theory and numerical analysis. At the same time, I selected most of my optional courses from physics: theory of relativity, advanced quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, theoretical elementary particle physics.
In 1981, I was a Summer Student at CERN in Geneva, and afterwards stayed on at CERN for a few more months to do my graduate diploma thesis work in experimental particle physics.
Back at KTH, in the theoretical elementary particle physics course, I was drafted by my teacher, Sverker Fredriksson, to join the Department of Theoretical Physics as a PhD student. That was an easy sell. I then had some of my best years, as a graduate student with Sverker as advisor.
After my PhD, I went to the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique in Bordeaux as a post-doc for one year. Without going into details, let it be said that this period of my life was more rewarding oenologically than academically.
I had done a fair amount of teaching since I came back from the USA, first as a substitute teacher in high school, then as a teaching assistant at the KTH, and toward the end of my PhD studies as a lecturer. I was somewhat isolated in Bordeaux, and I missed teaching and the direct student feedback. So, I wrote to the math department at KTH and asked if they needed an associate professor (lecturer) for one year. They did, and then they did too for another year, and then for one more year, and then… I enjoyed teaching at the math department, especially for the first few years. I also had the opportunity to spend a (very small) fraction of my time doing physics research together with Sverker during these years.
After a certain number (to be exact without being too explicit, the first non-trivial palindrome (in base 10) prime) of years at the KTH math department, I joined Ericsson and started working in the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) field. Presently, I am a researcher at the Network Processing and Storage Lab within the Packet Technologies area of Ericsson Research. One current research topic is the study of the characteristics of a network and its traffic conditions with access only to systems on the edge of the network.
As a side interest with semi-professional bearings… (to be continued)
I met my wife, Eva, in the mid-80s. We have two wonderful kids: our son Malte, born in 1990, and our daughter Svea, born in 1992.