I love these kinds of stories. Sounds like a long con to steal a bunch of erasers, though.
When he told the story tonight, he added that at the end of the two plus hours, Vandiver erased the whole thing, muttered to himself, and abruptly left.
But I ain't never been to Nacogdoches.
|| Early in the thread, but as it's about a beloved old numbers guy: Does Paul Krugman have some noxious illness? He's not looking good. |>
I can understand why nobody would have walked out. Imagine being able to tell the story of being in the room when Fermat's Last Theorem was proven. That would be something.
He's not looking good.
I see what you mean, but his skin is a fine color and he still has some tone in his arms, which makes me think he's just dropped weight recently but isn't sick. But I'm no doctor. Has he mentioned a new regimen?
6: Indeed, here's a guy who was in the room even when it didn't end up being proven still telling the story at banquets fifty years later.
I've come up with an ingenious proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but its too bit to write in an Unfogged comment box.
It involves Corn Flakes, weasels, and a 57-year-old real-estate agent named "Delores."
Charming, or awful? This is why you should think twice before inviting an 80-year-old to give a talk.
It doesn't have to be an 80 year old as long as they're a bit off.
A friend of mine from a few years ago had a story about going to a talk by Kripke. It was supposed to be a talk about names and naming (unsurprisingly), and he started out by explaining at length that the argument about Superman/Clark Kent didn't work after all because Superman's actual name was Kal-El not Clark Kent which was an alias he was given later in life, and suggested that Batman/Bruce Wayne would be a better example because that one would actually work out the way the Superman one seemed like it did (but actually didn't). Also he spent something like a combined twenty minutes rummaging through a bag he had brought up to the podium with him looking for things that he wanted for no obvious reason (I think especially a pen). People were mostly patient with it, probably because, hey, who knows it might suddenly go somewhere interesting (it didn't). But the Q&A afterwards was pretty sparse.
12: it's charming when it's 1961.
One of the many Norbert Weiner stories* is that during one of his lectures, he said "... and the proof of this step is trivial." Then he paused for a while and began to cover the blackboards**, and after half an hour he stopped. "Yes, the proof is trivial," and continued on.
* Weiner is a math story attractor, just as Mark Twain is a quote attractor, so the above may be apocryphal.
** Another version is that he just stopped and stared at the blackboard for half an hour.
Nat Edmonson, Jr. has no picture available and apparently ghosted in 1942. Obviously, a Nazi spy.
Stories like this are cute, but too much of this sort of behavior is a sign of a dysfunctional field. (The Kripke example makes me think of this especially.) It is a sign that you are developing a cult of genius, which really misrepresents the way knowledge is created. At the extreme, you see people get a following who are able to perform the role of the distracted genius very well, but don't actually do anything. I believe AOL has a full-time in house "genius" that is like that.
The other important thing is that women and minorities are rarely called geniuses when they behave this way. And there was that study recently that showed that there was more gender inequality in fields where people said success required "innate talent." (Philosophy was a big example here.)
David Shing may be the only full-time staff.
The only time I have seen a Nobel laureate give a talk, it was a clear example of "genius" being indulged into a state of incompetence.
The other important thing is that women and minorities are rarely called geniuses when they behave this way.
I like to think female professors who act weird are still called geniuses, but in the only examples I can think of, "acting weird" means having long unruly grey hair or decorating her office with a hundred plants and incense burners. Not actually acting weird.
I ignore colleagues in order to focus on math problems. Mostly it's to get them to leave my office.
A novel laureate taught my nonequilobrium stat physics class. He was so old and befuddled. It was really sad.
18 - With Kripke though there was a non-zero chance he was going to do something genuinely spectacular in the talk, and who knows he might even have been going somewhere eventually so people put up with it. I don't remember the story being told with fondness though - more with a general "well that was a waste of time". After all as much as he's admired Kripke isn't really people are always that affectionate about either.
I mean, yeah he does get a lot of deference when he misbehaves (though he's not really at Princeton anymore for a reason), but he's also a legitimate genius who has revolutionized multiple areas so treating him that way makes total sense in a way that it doesn't really for most 'genius' scholars.
Was Kripke the guy who said they should mail me 800 CDs a year for the bulk of the 90s?
According to McDowell, Kripke's contribution to the Truth and Meaning collection edited by McDowell and Evans was more or less extemporized. He just dictated it, from no text and in one go, to McDowell.
A talk that I attended that had some flavor of the OP was a talk by EF Codd (grand old man of relational databases at the time) sometime on the late 80s or so. It was billed as a debate between him and an object-oriented DB guy. The OODB gave his spiel first, but when Codd got up he rejected the premise of the debate and gave a somewhat rambling talk =in which he talked about ants, and his desire to write a novel about a company that goes under because it does not pay enough attention to its data. Most of the audience lapped it up.
I am in general agreement with the sentiments expressed by rhc in 18.
For pretty much every talk I've been to in the past several years, I've spent most of the time reading and commenting here.
...and gave a somewhat rambling talk =in which he talked about ants, and his desire to write a novel...
Another field entirely but this reminds me of a very entertaining talk I attended by Richard Bull/iet where he ranged all over the place but highlights included the probable origin of the word "dildo" from Ali ibn Abi Taleb's donkey Duldul, and something about the increase of violence in popular media being ascribed to the lack of contact with animal husbandry in our culture including birth, copulation (the animals with one another and the farm boys with the animals), and slaughter etc,. It was a whirlwind performance but I think not appreciated by most of the audience other than myself.
At the extreme, you see people get a following who are able to perform the role of the distracted genius very well, but don't actually do anything.
This is my ultimate career goal.
the probable origin of the word "dildo" from Ali ibn Abi Taleb's donkey Duldul
Sadly, there is no reference to that theory in the wikipedia entry for the etymology of "dildo" although it is good to know that the word appears in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. "Dildo" is really one of the funniest words in the English language.
At the extreme, you see people get a following who are able to perform the role of the distracted genius very well, but don't actually do anything.
I've mentioned this before, but I had a 'peer' when I was a grad student who had this whole thing down pat. He'd totally nailed every aspect of the distracted genius, youthful tweedy upper-class don variety. And he totally milked it. I had senior academics* tell me how brilliant he was.
And yet, as far as I could tell, he was an idiot.** His seminar papers were amateurish crap that gave great 'Slate pitch'. The one line summaries of them made them all sound like hugely interesting boundary stretching work. But the execution was crap, and he always had huge holes that anyone paying attention could drive a bus through.
He basically just hand-wavingly Boris Johnsoned over those in talks, though, and those paying attention to the surface rather than the content, were often persuaded.
He probably has a tenured job somewhere now.
* philosophers that this audience would have heard of.
** I mean, as much of an idiot as someone on that course could have been. He'd still have been a pretty stellar undergraduate.
Perhaps I need to do a strategic purchase of tweed....
There's a story of Joan Robinson giving a lecture in her later days, I think visiting Stanford. She had the lecture written out beforehand. And she ended up repeating the pair of pages three times.
One of the professors got up, sat down beside her, and started turning pages. Robinson said, "There's clearly been a muck up somewhere", and went on.
re 31 I was lucky enough to have Bull/iet for a required seminar as a college freshman and it was *exactly* the talk you describe repeated, with like, trivial variations, 3 times a week for a year. It was perfect and the rest of college was a letdown in comparison.
I had a grad class with a classic "distracted genius," Nao/mi Sche/man. She did not write a syllabus, or assign books. When she came to class, it was at least half an hour late. She rarely came to class. It was... Not ideal.
Reflecting on the gendered and racialized aspects of the "distracted genius" trope got me thinking about my undergraduate experience.
About midway through my undergraduate degree, I became very depressed. I had a very hard time getting to sleep and, when I did, a very hard time mustering up the will to get myself out of bed in the morning. At some point, I stopped going to class almost entirely except when there were exams. I managed to maintain a reasonably good GPA in this period -- at least above a 3.5. The physics department at my school was really quite bad* so anyone who could consistently pull low A's at least stood out.
So what the professors saw was a white male never coming to class, turning in maybe 80% of his homework and sometimes turning it in two hours after missing class, never going to office hours, and getting very good but not top scores on exams. From their standpoint it looked like I was smart but lazy. But I really was working about as hard as one would need to in order to get good grades on the exams -- probably a little bit harder, since not going to class left me without much guidance with respect to what in the textbooks to focus on, useful information that wasn't in the text, etc. So I think the general impression I left them with was "smart, but lazy, unfocused, and arrogant". But really, I didn't know how to talk to people, how to communicate with people, or how to handle being so depressed all the time. It left a lot of people with really bad impressions of me, I think. In my last year, I finally figured out that I had to just say something, and so I did. I just told all of my professors that I had a really hard time sleeping to the point where I couldn't concentrate or would doze off in class and that I was getting medical help for it (I started doing that around the same time). I let them know ahead of time that I wasn't going to ask for any designated favors with respect to deadlines, but that I was going to be deliberate and strategic about what classes I would miss if, for example, I didn't sleep at all one night -- choosing to miss lectures on material that I was already more familiar with or felt more confident in my ability to do entirely through self-study. That helped, and people were generally pretty nice to me about it, and I was able to go to office hours without feeling as embarrassed and hateful of myself whereas before I had been afraid to go because I was afraid of coming off as either too lazy to just do everything myself or entitled to not show up to class and have everything explained to me.
I'm doing a lot better now. I'm not saying that I wasn't at least kind of lazy, unfocused and arrogant, but once people think that you're smart, failure to succeed looks like a personal moral failing. And I think it's a lot harder to talk to someone or get the help you need when people think that you're a bad person instead of a confused one.
*I know it sounds
*was supposed to be:
"I know it sounds awful to talk about where I went to school that way, but it really was very, very bad.
40: I don't think the smartness/dumbness of the student affects much how I think if the kid doesn't come to class. In other words, if a kid never comes to class, my assumptions about the kid are mostly independent of their performance on the tests. If it's a lower level class, I probably think something like, "this kid really hates math and just wants to be far away" and if it's an upper level class, I think something like, "this kid is maybe unravelling a bit" depending if they seem stressed out or lackadaisacal.
What if they just stopped emailing while working on a dissertation?
Anyway, graduate school didn't do any great favors for my sanity.