I first met Vladimir Gerdt early on in the Applications of Computer Algebra (ACA) series at RISC-Linz, Hagenberg, Austria in 1996. He was very friendly and we got along well. At the conference, he and Jacques Calmet volunteered to be the program chairs for ACA’1997 which was held in Wailea, Maui, Hawaii. I was to be the general chair that year. Working with the two of them was a delight as they were both super-organized and very responsive to emails. Vladimir became an ACA regular, and was frequently involved as a session organizer as well as program co-chair (ACA’2004 in Beaumont, Texas) and general co-chair (ACA’2006 in Varna, Bulgaria and ACA’2008 at RISC-Linz, Austria). He was also a special guest to Albuquerque, New Mexico (where the ACA series originated in 1995) for ACA’2001, where he stayed with Bill Pletsch (and his wife Bonnie), the general chair for that year. Generally, Vladimir came to every ACA he could, but did skip ones for which he could not obtain funding, a perennial problem for Russians. When he did come, his sessions were always excellent and well attended; he was a very good speaker.

In the spring of 1998, I visited Russia for the first time. Vladimir was my host at the Laboratory of Computing Techniques and Automation, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, my first stop. I missed my flight from Zürich to Moscow, so was put on a later plane. Even though I was three hours late and was unable to contact Vladimir about my delay, he had waited patiently for my arrival. After spending a couple of days in Dubna during which I gave a talk, we were driven to the Moscow train station where we met with Victor Edneral. The group of us took the “Red Arrow” that left at 11:59 pm (arranged so that the journey spanned two days of travel for reimbursement purposes) to Saint Petersburg for CASC’1998 (Workshop on Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing). I had many opportunities to chat with Vladimir during my time in Russia. I learned that he had some German background, which he suggested might have had something to do with his superb organizational skills.

CASC’2000 was in Samarkand and Bukhara, Uzbekistan and many of us went to this conference. Vladimir and Ernst Mayr were co-chairs. Vladimir commented that even though Uzbekistan was relatively close to home (compared to most of the attendees), it was quite an exotic locale for him to visit. At the conference dinner in Samarkand, we were entertained by an amazing dancing exhibition. Two Uzbek women, one a national artist and the other very talented, traded off as they performed traditional dancing in which there were many carefully coordinated movements of hands and shoulders, swirling of dresses, lifting of arms and synchronized shifting of feet. At some point, several of us went outside and started dancing on our own, led by Stan Steinberg and Vladimir. Later, the conference attendees were driven from Samarkand to Bukhara. We were an unusual group, and so made the TV news at an intermediate stop along the route. Vladimir, handsome and debonair as well as charming and fluent in Russian, was lionized by the news crews, and so was our representative. The rest of us did not mind at all.

Vladimir was both a great mathematician as well as a great person, and I will sorely miss him. ACA’2021 (virtual online) will have a session dedicated to his memory entitled “Computational Differential and Difference Algebra and its Applications”. This session had originally been proposed in 2020 with Vladimir as co-organizer.