I was born in Helsinki in 1951 and lived my childhood in the utopian garden city of Tapiola. From there I first attended the German School in city center and was later transferred into a Finnish co-educational school, one that happened to be right next to my home, together with my brother.

In 1986 I thought, as a young docent (adjunct professor), that it would be good for students to take part in a pure curiosity-promoting seminar instead of passive lectures. There I presented to them various things, as did the participants. Soon I noted that a few of them were worth gold, and we continued with what is known as the type theory the Stockholm logician Per Martin-löf had invented and that I’d presented in detail in the seminar.

At some point I’d had enough of the study of the philosophy and development of probability theory, and based on someone’s idea, I almost accidentally drifted into subjects like the foundations of geometry. This led to very a specific open problem in the proof theory of logico-mathmatical systems, one I invented but couldn’t solve, but Sara Negri did (at the helm in the picture): She had taken a course in proof theory in Amsterdam in 1992, about five years earlier. Soon it became evident that her results had been believed impossible to achieve!

If ones who asks this question have a phone in their pocket or a tablet in their hands, I say: You would not have that, and we would not have this information society if Kurt Gödel & co. hadn’t in the 20’s and 30’s thought profoundly about the questions of the foundations of logic and arithmetic. The concepts and theories of formal languages and calculation arose from these ideas, and then in turn programming languages and algorithmic computation.