Einar Lindholm
I got to know Einar Lindholm over twenty years ago, when he wrote to me one of the long, meticulously detailed letters for which he was well known. It was clear from that first contact, which grew into a friendship, that Einar was an experimentalist, but also that he was a theorist, and a special kind of person.
As an experimentalist Lindholm was a master builder of spectrometers, the instruments that chemists and physicists construct to induce recalcitrant matter to send to us the signals from within that reveal to us the inner structure and motion of molecules. Perhaps because his work fell in between chemistry and physics, perhaps because his views cut across the grain, his achievements were sometimes undervalued in Sweden. Not so in the rest of the world. Reliable, precise measurement, beautifully interpreted, of various spectra of molecules, is what he and his able co-workers were known for, worldwide.
But Einar was also a theoretician manqut. One had the feeling that in some alternative universe he surely would have been a theorist. He was persistent, even obstinate, in seeking to understand the way electrons moved in molecules. The theories he and his co-workers built were outside the mainstream of theoretical chemistry. But their mark was that they worked, and I suspect that people will come back to them.
People who interacted with this remarkable scientist could not fail to be drawn into this world. So was I, so was a young Chinese co-worker of mine, Jing Li. Einar Lindholm was dedicated to knowledge; he was persistent and intent. I will remember the letters from his sickbed, a few weeks before his death, patiently dealing with the comments of a nasty reviewer of his paper. I remember the retired professor anxious to present a simple poster at a scientific congress. I remember him learning at age seventy to run my computer programs from young Jing Li. He will be missed.