The diamond professor: a portrait of Josef Mazanec

摘要

It is truly a privilege to have a job where you get paid to create what you wish tocreate every day of your professional life. It allows you, at the end of your career, tolook back on your growth and achievements and the growth and achievements ofthose around you. There are many such professions; no doubt, architects look withpride back on all the beautiful buildings they have created, engineers feel that theyhave contributed by inventing new technologies that make life safer for people andgardeners are filled with joy seeing their hard work blossom. Academics are seen bythe wider public as a bunch of boring and slightly eccentric nerds. Yet, although ourwork is not as tangible as that of an architect, an engineer or a gardener, it is equallycreative and we look back on it with pride. Of course, sometimes when a paper isfinished, we wish we had chosen to be furniture makers, so we could actually visuallyadmire what we have created, but still: we can look back, giggle at the many deadends we got stuck in over the years, but overall feel satisfied about that new idea wehad, that new thought, that new method, that new visualization, that new theory wehave developed or simply just a paragraph that finally gets across to the reader whatwe have tried so desperately to express.