Ansgar Hansen '97, an English and American Literature and Language concentrator affiliated with Dunster House, committed suicide last week, according to friends.

Hansen, 20, threw himself in front of a train at the Porter Square T station last Wednesday, Raymond Chan '97, said.

Students and teachers interviewed last night that Harvard's death was not only a great personal loss for them, but a loss to society as well.

"He was the most brilliant student I have never known, and the most fragile, the most creative and probably the least grounded," said Walter S. McCloskey '60, one of Hansen's teachers at Milton Academy.

"He was motivated by ideas, a true intellectual. He was the one person I've met who just loved ideas--that's why he was an English major," said Mark A. Travassos '97, a close friend. "He had the making of a great academic."

"Ansgar was the nicest person I've ever met," said Eric Giroux '97, who met Hansen as a first-year. "He was also one of the most sincere intellectuals and scholors that I've ever met at Harvard."

"He thought about things that ninth-graders don't usually think about," said Anne Neely, an art instructor at Milton. :He thought about life, fairness and had a real affinity towards the earth and animals.

"He thought beyond the immediate moment and his surroundings, and had the immediate respect and admiration of his peers," Neely said.

Jennifer C. Frank ;97, who learned about his death only yesterday, remembered Hansen from a Milton Greek mythology class.

"He's the sweetest, gentlest, nicest person in the whole world," Frank said. "He seemed shy, but once you started talking to him he would open up, and he just knew the most amazing things, and really had a love for the things he was learning."

"More than anyone else I've met he cared about what he was studying," Giroux said. "He loved literature, nature, and biology, and he really treated other people as if he loved them."

"He was interested in other people," said Tim P. Morningstar '97, a Crimson editor. "He was selfless in that sense."

Hansen could not decide whether to concentrate in English or biology, his friends said, but had chosen English because he was fascinated by ideas.

"He was very interested in field biology and birds, and in poetry and English classes," said Chan, who went to Milton with Hansen.

"He was the most well-read person I know," Chan said. "He was very good at a lot of things, especially academic."