Gjerrit Meinsma was born on the 29th of January 1965 in Opeinde,
a little village in the northern part of The Netherlands. There he
attended the nursery school ``De Kindertuin'' and elementary school.
In the off-school hours he spent many hours making and
throwing boomerangs at and with his friends, and in the weekends he used
to play korfball. From the age of 12 till the age of 18
he attended the grammar-school ``Het Drachtster Lyceum'' in the nearby town
Drachten. Somewhere in the middle of this period
the fascinating world of music caught his attention.
Listening to music and playing the piano have been his major hobbies since.
At the same time Gjerrit developed a keen interest in mathematics,
and he decided to pursue his career in this direction.
In 1983 he went to Enschede to study applied mathematics
at the University of Twente. At the end of 1988 he finished his master's
thesis entitled ``Chebyshev approximation by free knot splines'' and in
March 1989 he received his master's degree. After a break of
five weeks he returned to the faculty he graduated with, only this time as a
research assistant (AiO) with the Systems and Control Group. Half a year
later he bought himself a brand new Klug & Sperl upright piano, and
a few years later, in 1993, he finished his thesis on H-infinity
control. Not long thereafter he dumped his winter coat in the garbage
bin and left for sunny Australia were he worked as a post-doc for three
years with the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of
Newcastle. In January 1997 he returned to Enschede to take up a two-year
post-doc position with his former group. He quickly acquired a
much needed winter coat. Since 1999 he holds a permanent position at this
group.
Gjerrit likes all sorts of music, but he is fanatic only about
classical music. His favorite composers are Bach, Beethoven,
Schubert, Chopin, Grieg, Ravel, Skriabin and Janacek. He
is a fan of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and also likes very
much Sofronitsky, Lipatti, Rubinstein, Oborin and Henkemans and many others.
