Nadezhda Gaponenko

It’s a heavy loss, I still can’t come to my senses, even though I prepared myself for this moment. It’s clear that this is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I met Ted at the first MP meeting in Washington in 1996. Jerry detailed Ted’s professional accomplishments, but went unnoticed that Ted was one of the first who started to shift future studies to a complexity paradigm. Here he and I found each other, and our joint work at that time became the proposal of the collaborative project of the MP and the Santa Fe Institute at the NSF USA about the implementation of chaos and complexity theory in future studies. In fact, Ted made two revolutions in the study of the future:  more than a half a century ago he put it on a new track, based on the knowledge of experts, and when he was already over sixty, that is, he was at the age when normal people sit with a fishing rod on the shore of a lake, he stood up at the origins of this great transition to the complexity paradigm. I called Ted the Golden Brains of Futures Studies. Inventing and creating something was the same need for him as having breakfast in the morning and going to bed in the evening. It should be admitted that in many ways the success of the MP was based on Ted’s innovation. No doubt his works will long outlive him.

Ted as a special individual surprised and fascinated even more than. I think many people know that at the beginning of the century, Ted and his son were simultaneously diagnosed with cancer. The doctors gave them three months. Ted said: I don’t believe it! He sold a house in Florida and an airplane; three doctors lived with them for a year and they both won. Fantastic victory! He demonstrated that the impossible is possible! But this was not enough for him to get a final and irrevocable victory. In 2006, in Spain at the EC conference, he told me: my son and I built an airplane. That’s the big deal he put in this matter and that’s the lesson he taught us all!!

I can’t help but remember Anna. I was always touched by the way Ted looked at Anna, how terribly he was worried before each of his presentations, and Anna was very worried about him. I was in the evening in memory of Anna and was shocked. At 90 years old, Ted told with such youthful fire how he recaptured Anna from her fiancé; his eyes burned, his voice boomed. Thinking about it: he carried this feeling throughout his life. Another lesson for everyone! We are lucky, we had many lessons on how to live, how to love, how to be friends.

Of course, we will remember him, our children will remember him, and we’ll tell our grandchildren what values the best sons of humanity built their lives on. I thank fate that Ted was in my life. But today it is very difficult to accept this new reality that Ted is gone. I tried several times to write a letter of condolences to family, friends and the Millennium Project, but I couldn’t squeeze out a single line.

Take heart