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.

He had unnerved my parents by saying to my Finnish mother: “Mutti hei, nyt Janne schraibesi mun Rechnenheftiin!” (Something like "Hey Mutti, now Janne schraibed into my Rechnenheft!") That German I’d learnt as a child turned out to be an unforeseen advantage when 40 years later I had to read archaic German handwriting and even dig into the secrets of shorthand writing.

I started studying mathematics, philosophy, and some smaller topics in 1970. During the university’s crazy 1970’s it could happen that one with a bachelor's degree and barely over 20 years could get the job as a temporary part-time assistant, and so I started teaching in 1972.

hat is something I would not recommend to anyone. However, to my luck I had found a magnificent conceptual problem in the philosophy of probability and with it as my guiding star I finished my thesis in 1979, in the midst of other tasks and duties, without anyone’s guidance. Somehow I thought that one has to find the research problems on one’s own. Luckily a few foreign colleagues were understanding and helped me find an international scientific community to which I presented my results and thoughts.