My father’s talent and imagination were uncommon.

He started learning computer-aided design in 1988 for structural engineering applications while using computer-aided calculation for the same purpose even earlier, in the late Seventies, with a very rudimentary calculator produced by Texas Instruments. He was a self-taught and talented painter and illustrator, too (see figures).

He loved music, mainly classical music, jazz and some American singers (Frank Sinatra and Liza Minelli among them) and he used to build his own Hi-Fi sets.

During the Apollo missions, he calculated the trajectory of the Apollo spacecraft: the orbit around the Moon and the way back to Earth.

He had an interest in early hominids and in the origins of our species. When I was a child I had the chance to dream of a lost world of ape-like men, as I explored his collection of magazines from the US, mainly National Geographic and Life.

He could have even found a cure for ME/CFS, had he had a chance to try. Who knows. He died in 1996.