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Every time I had to write an important piece, a preface, official letter, laudation, or a speech, before sending it out, I always showed it to Eli.He was the ultimate judge with an infallible sense of style and wisdom.How can I write or say anything now?I am speechless without Eli.I have known him more than half of my life.Since 1985, I regularly participated in the weekly geometry seminars he started and ran jointly with Ricky Pollack at Courant Institute.This changed my mathematical life and interest forever.We wrote joint papers, and for one of them we shared the Lester Ford Prize of the Mathematical Association of America.We co-edited books and journals, and co-organized several conferences, including a Special Semester at MSRI in Berkeley, in 2003.My wife and I attended his daughter's Bat Mitzvah, he and his wife came to my daughter's.They gave us tickets to the legendary Peoples' Symphony Concerts at Washington Irving High School.We were invited to unforgettable Seders at their house, led by Eli's father, a secular judaistic scholar who fascinated us by his vast knowledge, and we were enchanted by Eli's daughters.Ten years after defending his PhD in algebraic geometry at Columbia University, under the direction of the Fields medalist Hironaka, Eli fell in love with a new field of mathematics, combinatorial geometry, where he made groundbreaking discoveries, together with Ricky Pollack.They became the founding fathers of a new discipline along the borderline of mathematics
János Pach (Fri,) studied this question.