So it goes
Just learned that one of my favourite university teachers died last year. Julian Besag was quite peculiar, even by the standards of academic mathematicians, but I loved the two courses I took with him. His 3H Stochastic Processes course was considered to be exceptionally demanding and in my year only six students took it. It was far and away my strongest course though and the six people who chose it were a great group and very able. Once in a while Julian would set an unsolved research problem as homework (without telling us of course). It gave me my only real taste of what mathematical research was like. He'll be missed.