The collaboration between Zdzislaw Szymanski and his Warsaw group on one side, and Sven-Gösta Nilsson and his Lund group on the other side has a long and fruitful tradition. When I became a graduate student in Lund in 1974, the collaboration was since long well established. During the academic year 1974-75 Zdzislaw was a visiting professor at the department of mathematical physics, and I could meet Zdzislaw very much in parallel with Sven-Gösta. This was indeed a great advantage for me and for my future.

Every Friday morning autumn 1974 the Lund nuclear theory group took the 8 o’clock ferry boat from Malmö to Copenhagen to visit the weekly course by Ben Mottelson on the new subject of high-spin physics, followed by extensive discussions between the Lund people (including Zdzislaw of course), and the Copenhagen people, including Aage Bohr, Matthias Brack, Phillipe Quentin, Ikuko Hamamoto, Rajat Bhaduri and Byron Jennings. The preparation for these discussions was fine-tuned during the travel, and our breakfast table on the ferry boat was always covered with papers with calculations and figures showing latest high-spin results. The lecture of Ben was “easy” to understand, until we sat down on the way back from Copenhagen and in more detail tried to figure out what he really said. This resulted in special lectures in Lund given jointly by Joachim Krumlinde and Zdzislaw on explaining what was “really” said in the lecture, filling out the text (and formulas) between the lines presented by Ben at the lecture. As a young graduate student, I could not be more fortunate in being allowed to listen to and join such a qualified team of researchers starting up a new research project!

Having Sven-Gösta as my supervisor was of course a great privilege. But the respect from my side was also large, and it was not easy to dare to show my ignorance and ask him for detailed explanations. Here I was even more lucky to have Zdzislaw around. Zdzislaw was an extremely good teacher who could sit down with me and explain in detail everything I hesitated to ask Sven-Gösta about. He was indeed very psychologically talented. After some difficult seminar on theoretical nuclear physics I was very much comforted by Zdzislaw. I dared to tell him that I did not understand much of what was said. He then replied in a very friendly way that, in fact, he did not understand it either. But then he explained the whole seminar to me, so he obviously understood it completely. But it was done in such a way that my self-confidence was not destroyed, but rather strengthened by his wise way of treating his pupil!