Dear Peter, dear all, it's my great pleasure to welcome all of you to this, let's say,

farewell event in the honor of Peter Knapner.

I just escaped the university board and I should convey the best wishes of our president

and the entire university board.

We are all aware of your achievements.

You have served the university in a variety of ways as a departmental chair, as a senator,

as chair of the entire department and faculty at that point in time.

Not only of course the achievements and your engagement in the university matters, but

also of course with regard to your personal and scientific achievements.

So best wishes and gratefulness from the side of the university board.

Peter for your 25 years now at the University of Erlangen-Norenberg, it will be my pleasure

to say a few words about that situation.

I think it is a touching moment as an era, as I say, an era is going to end anytime very

soon now.

What I call an era is not just the chair of Applied Mathematics 1, the founding chair

of FAU Applied Mathematics as I pointed out already on Monday.

The era is about personality, is about charismatic person, is about you Peter, and of course

the achievements over the years.

Even for charismatic persons, a solid infrastructure is favorable and helps to spread an aura of

professionalism, even in mathematics to tell the truth, where most of the people outside

of the building still believe that a mathematician just needs a paper and a pencil.

Admittedly, sometimes we like to coquette with this metaphor as long as the support

of the public people is guaranteed with the imagination of a mathematician as a genius.

Going back Peter to infrastructure, indeed, your chair, in fact as AM2 also, have been

given birth with gifts that a classical chair of mathematics would never start with.

I also looked into the old papers again, so two professors on the assistant and associate

level, this was the time when the chair was installed in 1968, in fact, nine, four scientific

collaborators, one secretary and cleaning personnel by the way, along with about 20,000

Deutschmark at that point in time, which was jazzed up any time very soon.

I think you had something like 40,000 a number of years.

In turn, quite a favorable situation to start the business that you did.

We know that as a mathematician, of course, that initial conditions play an incredible

role in dynamical systems.

Let me say some words about that situation before I embark on the personal path, so to

speak.

I showed you these pictures.

Now it's condensed, you see we're talking about one chair.

These are the holders of the chair of applied mathematics.

One, I don't want to go into the details, but those of you who have not been available

on Monday, so the first chair holder was Gunther Meynardus, inaugurated in 1968, so we are

talking a little bit more than 50 years here of applied mathematics at Friedrich-Alexander

University at Lernberg, and he was succeeded by Professor Hubert Weineichke.

I gave a little sketch of the biography earlier on Monday, so I ask you to forgive me if I

don't repeat that.

And you see Peter on his throne later.

The picture is quite recent, in fact, but I deliberately used the word throne in a sense.

So to elude a little bit on the situation, I try to also collect the pictures from the

Monday session on the professors who have been here so far.

Maybe I should not go into the details.

We are talking about the situation somehow, you know, previous, the previous situation.