Where we were learning

There are many people we are grateful for their work. But only a few of them influenced my life and my work as much as these three. I list them to make easier to understand the roots our company is built upon.

Johann Sebastian Bach - He took the proper amount of the contemporary stuff, familiar to the people listening to his music. He added the proper amount of unexpected, innovative stuff, never heard before. He had used old chorals and fugues, respecting the strictness of polyphony, adding absolutely new harmonies and beautiful melodies. And he prioritized his own point of view instead of any servility to the listeners - because he knew better what the good music is.

Our preferences are always affected by the overall fashion. Cars, computers, clothes, buildings, all of them are very similar in certain periods. If someone would design anything too extraordinary, it wouldn't be considered to be beautiful.  People need innovations, but they must be growing up from the contemporary style, not turning it inside out. Bach made the maximum possible innovation in the baroque music.

Richard Philip Feynman - One of the smartest people who ever lived on this planet. His humor sense and his perfect talent to point to the important facts made his lectures a fantastic reading. And he was a great musician, as you can read in his other books. He had shown to the world that teaching is the highest goal the scientist could have. Feynman's path integrals give an alternative view to the quantum mechanics. The alternative view, this is what we always need.

I was also fascinated by the principles stating that nature selects one of many possible ways. For instance, the Fermat's principle: The light beam takes the fastest way to go between two points. How the beam could measure the time of all possible paths and select the fastest one? Later I have found that every "selecting" principle has an alternative explanation, for the light it even shows, that the Fermat's principle is not correct. Feynman gave us such alternative explanations in the world, where our imagination doesn't work properly - in quantum mechanics.

For me, a genius is not the one who uses known methods to solve complex problems. Genius is the one who is able to create methods to solve any problem.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - He pointed in his Citadelle (translated into English as "The Wisdom of the Sands") that people need some rules, something guiding them ahead. and it makes them happier than they would be without their tasks. Freedom is over all, I know, I was missing it in my country eagerly for years. However, freedom doesn't mean no rules, it doesn't mean spending days not working, it doesn't mean I don't care for the other people.

Lubor Prikryl, Audiffex director