My friend Peter Scott does not seem to be feeling too well. He had prostrate cancer for a long time and there was a relapse two years ago. Since then, he has been to the hospital off and on, recently to ER for a day. We first met in Liverpool in 1968. Later we corresponded in 1972, he was still in Liverpool and I in Bombay. Some of the resulting work by him was noticed widely and we lost touch, but he seemed to be keeping track of my work and sometimes referred to my work even when it did not seem necessary. Then around 1984, he was one of the organisers of a conference in Warwick. He told me that the conference was organised to understand some of Thurston’s work and I should attend and talk to others since it is difficult to understand it alone. I did attend and it helped. He seems to have decided to resurrect my career since he might have seen some promise in the early days of our contact. We met again in Stillwater in 1986 and he came up with two problems for us to work on, we ended up doing both, one each by correspondence. Then he visited a Melbourne in 1994 and again decided to work with me on some problems of common interest. I was aware of the first one but had no idea how to start. He gave me a paper of Tukia and said what all I had to do was to read about five pages there for the clues. This turned out to be the torus theorem that was completed by others later on. It also started a period of intense collaboration which is still going on. It is probably the hardest work that either of us was ever engaged in and slowly clarified several related problems that interested us. Like many of these things, this kind of difficult technical work may not interest others but was very satisfactory for us. The final clarifications came only this year. Meanwhile we found that we made some mistakes in the early days and since some of this material entered mainstream, it seemed a good idea to publish corrections. But corrections and extensions became another long and difficult affair and seems to be reaching completion now. This will be some thing which nobody may read but compelling to us. Meanwhile Peter keeps chiselling away whenever he is well.
