Benny Lautrup: Så megen venlighed 1953

 Bennys erindringer: 

"Min mor gled i en hundelort på Vesterbrogade i København, da min far tilfældigvis kom gående forbi. Han hjalp hende op, og derfor er jeg."

Fra yumpu.com - fra Benny's nbi.dk konto
Benny Lautrup - populære artikler, anmeldelser og foredrag
bibliotek.dk articles - da.wiki

Benny died age 85, on January 3, 2025. Alzheimer was the cause.
NBIA obituary

Birthe: "Benny har de sidste måneder oplevet alvorlige skred i sin sygdom. Og især inden for de sidste to uger er det gået drastisk ned ad bakke, hvor han så yderligere pådrog sig en lungebetændelse, mistede sin bedste ven på plejehjemmet, og holdt op med at spise og indtage væske. I formiddags kl. 11 døde han fredfyldt, efter jeg og hans drenge havde haft to vågenætter hos ham. Hvor meget jeg end vil savne ham, er jeg glad for, han nu har fået ro, for han var så stærkt svækket af sin sygdom, at livskvaliteten var forsvundet.

Han holdt meget af dig, og så ofte på jeres fælles 2005 billede."

Translated with DeepL.com :

In recent months, Benny has experienced serious slips in his illness. Especially in the last two weeks, he went drastically downhill, contracting pneumonia, losing his best friend at the nursing home, and stopping eating and drinking.

This morning at 11am, he died peacefully after his boys and I had spent two nights awake with him. As much as I will miss him, I am glad that he is now at peace, because he was so weakened by his illness that the quality of his life had disappeared.

He loved you very much and often looked at your picture together.

Søren Brunak: Mindeord for fysikprofessor Benny Lautrup       25. februar, 2025

Benny was one of the institute's most colorful employees, a formidable researcher, teacher and public debater.

Against all odds, a boy born to a single mother in Istedgade, he became a trailblazer and in 1965 earned a master's degree from the country's most prestigious academic institution, the Niels Bohr Institute. His career took him to the US  Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and later to CERN in Geneva and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique. In 1974 he returned to the Niels Bohr Institute as an associate professor of theoretical physics and later used his supercomputing skills to research artificial neural networks and contributed his physics toolbox to the development of artificial intelligence.

However, Benny came home to a Denmark in crisis, and this also applied to universities. It was a time when people were very stingy about promoting associate professors to professors. Despite the fact that people could be professors, associate professors had to take lessons in chair dancing to be able to boast about the professional level they had reached. At one point, there was an official announcement from the management that lecturers could call themselves “professors abroad”. Associate Professor Lautrup, who had an international background, found this ridiculous and started answering phone calls by saying “It's Benny Lautrup, professor abroad”.

He was not shy about criticizing the system - or his colleagues for that matter. In 1975, after Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the idea arose that the institute's old tandem accelerator (which can accelerate charged particles) should be replaced with a new version at a cost in the three-digit millions.

The new machine would advance the institute's research in nuclear physics. Benny's view was that the investment would be backward-looking and that it would be much more offensive to boost other under-funded areas of the time, such as high-energy physics and complex systems physics.

Benny's critical outspokenness led to him being invited for a stroll in Bernstorffsparken, where Aage Bohr tried to convince him of the merits of the plan. Aage had been so eager in his argument that he forgot to look where he was going and inadvertently stepped on an elderly lady's small dog. It howled wildly - after which the lady called the Nobel laureate a boor. Benny was later amused by how an associate professor and an elderly lady in a park had jointly tried to resist a tandem accelerator. 

Benny was hard to mess with. I thought of him recently when I heard about the death of DR journalist Jens Olaf Jersild. In connection with the publication of Benny's and my joint book Neural Networks - Computers with Intuition in 1988, Jersild interviewed us on TV Avisen.

Benny demonstrated our artificial neural network, which was trained to find syllables in Danish words and insert hypen-dashes in the right places in the words. A hyphenation problem had arisen in the newspapers when they had fired the language-competent typographers and left the task to stupid computers. The result was quite comical mistakes.

Jens Olaf Jersild asked Benny to type the words “kvalitetsfjernsyn” and “Kvægtorvet” into the program on the screen, and the correct answers came back immediately. Jens Olaf Jersild suggested that the latter was the opposite of the former, but Benny stuck to the science and didn't get involved in the TV host's little vendetta against the newly launched competing channel TV2, which was based at Kvægtorvet.

We were very proud that our network split both the words grill-bar and jazz-festival correctly, even though it had never before seen a single example of a word with a double consonant where word sharing was not allowed. Benny's sense of language was close to reality and life, which could otherwise slip into the background in all the physics theory, which he also mastered sublimely.

Ironically, the American physicist John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his neural network model, which we described in detail in the book.

Benny was a very charming man who was not uninterested in women. He had the advantage in city life that, due to his upbringing in Vesterbro, he rarely drank alcohol in large quantities. He was therefore able to stay attractive throughout the evening when the competition had long since gone under the table.

He had three lovely children, each with their own mother. Very surprisingly and fortunately, what physicists call a “phase transition” occurred in the middle of his life: He met Birthe, and the city life was exchanged for a quieter life with a cottage on Falster and flowers in a vase.

It was his fortune that Birthe and his children gathered around him for 30 years. The circle of friends was large, and Benny's funeral was, in Bent Fabricius Bjerre's words, “a success”: A packed church and a wake where people stood like herring in a barrel.