Ap Dijksterhuis

KQLA was working on the structure of molecules that was in the 1860s, what the most famous chemists did.

And some of the structures were known by then.

We knew what water looked like or oxygen.

But KQLA was working on more complex molecules.

Yeah, exactly.

And he was, I think, at the time working on what they called benzene, which is part of crude oil.

And he was working on it for quite a while.

He couldn't figure out...

the structure of that molecule and at some point he thought about it, he thought about it and he thought about it even more and then he dozed off in front of his fireplace and he fell asleep and in his dream he suddenly saw a snake biting its own tail and he woke up startled and he suddenly knew that benzene had the shape of a ring.

Yeah, that was exactly in a dream.

And that was at the time completely new.

Nobody had thought about it.

Yeah, he was shocked himself.

And of course, also elated because he immediately realized that it was not just a dream, that it was the solution.

He must have been euphoric as well.

Yeah, Poincaré did all kinds of different things.

He was really almost a universal scientist.

But one of the things he did was indeed Fuchsian equations.

There he worked on, I think, for seven or eight years already.

And he made some progress, but there was a big puzzle that he couldn't solve.