In my first year of undergraduate studies, some years ago now, I had the good fortune to work on a laboratory project with a professor of theoretical physics called Nick Rivier, a modest but brilliant academic with a gift for explaining complex concepts in simple terms.
Over the period of two semesters, my lab partner and I worked under the guidance of Professor Rivier and one of his PhD students, creating models of entities called continuous random networks; largely due to his contagious enthusiasm, we put in substantially more hours of lab work than was expected, working long into the evenings. Eventually our commitment paid off, and we hit upon something that allowed him to put the final piece in place for a significant research project on which he was working.
When we returned from our summer holidays to start the Autumn Semester, we discovered in our pigeonholes copies of the research paper that had been published following on from our laboratory project; Professor Rivier had not only included our names in the list of contributors, but had put them first.
As the lead name on the paper , I received postal requests for information from universities around the world , and my lab partner and I enjoyed a brief period of celebrity on campus. At that time we were part of a pretty select group of undergraduates to have had this happen to them; it was by no means common practice for first year students to be cited as contributors to a published paper, let alone given the lead.
When we asked the Professor why he had done it, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said that he already had numerous papers to his name, and anyway, we deserved it for all the extra work we had put in.
Over thirty years have passed since I have received a request for further information regarding ‘Chirality in Tetravalent Networks’, but Professor Rivier’s amazing generosity of spirit is still not lost on me; indeed it has served as a constant reminder to encourage and reward the efforts of those who might find themselves working under my guidance.
At the risk of sounding trite (we’ve all heard and read it a thousand times), people really do follow examples rather than orders or instructions, and great leaders do inspire, and I hope one day to look back and feel that I have lived up to that exceptional example that I was shown all those years ago.