His Royal Institution Christmas lectures inspired me to study maths, I was quite proud of getting red ink all through one school homework answer where I used his main area of work instead of whatever method the teacher was expecting to see.
Seriously, I met the dude once 25 years ago for a single evening and I still remember it vividly. Charisma seems an inadequate word for what he had. And he had the chops to back it up.
Meanwhile my University group invited Benoit Mandelbrot along in the same year and were making fun of him for years later. So self-important, so little to say. Zeeman, for his part, didn't actually mention his own work once. He wanted to talk maths and the history of maths and there was no subject we touched that he hadn't already thought deeply about.
