Death of a Professor

This morning I learnt about the death of one of my Professors at LSE, Claudio Ciborra. Two years ago, Professor Ciborra taught us about an Institutional Economics perspective on Information Systems. He has a book, Teams, Markets and Systems, which I painfully read. It was one of the books that I've found harder to read in my life, even harder than Sakurai's Quantum Mechanics one. I guess it was then when I realised that social sciences can be far more complicated than "science".

I could spend hours with just three or four pages of the book, writing down schemas, underlining sentences and linking concepts in mind maps. I don't know if I ever got to understand anything, but his insights are still in my mind, somewhere, waiting to be re-thought and applied to some research I will have to write someday.

The first day of class, Professor Ciborra said he wouldn't use Power Point in his classes: he would do it the traditional way: voice and a piece of chalk and a blackboard. He taught us about the metaphore of the "Armani glasses", and urged us to read Ronald Coase's paper on The nature of the firm.

Really, that's not what I expected from an Information Systems class. But in the end, after months of work, it all made sense, and I understood what Professor Ciborra meant. And it makes me so sad to think that in the end, it all makes sense in life as well. Life is senseless.