
Mathematical “urban legends” - mikevm
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends
======
CurtMonash
Since the thread there seems locked, I'll add:

I would be surprised if the snarky Ivy League mathematician from Japan was
Hironaka. He was much too gracious for that, including in that he overpraised
my thesis to my parents at my thesis defense.

Dean Yang's conjecture about Andy Gleason getting calculus onto the qualifying
exams was very credible. I'll add the story that a significant fraction of
Harvard math grad students passed their qualifications conditional on an
passing a later oral exam in one or two sub-disciplines. Joe Harris'
conditional was said to have been on calculus.

A Bulgarian visitor (this was in the 1970s) told me that all university
graduates in his country, or at least in his university, had to write a senior
thesis on applying Marxist-Leninist thought in their disciplines. He didn't go
on to explain how he'd done this in mathematics.

A visitor from, I think, the UK had rock-star style long hair. It was set on
fire by a candle at wine and cheese. I'm pretty sure Raoul Bott was the guy
working most closely with this visitor, which was regarded as funny since he
seemed a bit square in such respects.

I heard the Milnor story from Nick Gunther, who'd been a Princeton undergrad.
Nick was a heck of a story-teller in general. (His father was John Gunther, of
Death Be Not Proud fame.)

I have no stories about Andrew Wiles. He was quiet and polite.

Mackey was a character. I find the story believable.

Zariski's 80th birthday conference included a new paper by him, if I recall
correctly.

~~~
CurtMonash
OK. I've gotten to the Ofer Gabber part now. Ofer was in my dorm, and indeed
had the room next to mine. That dorm held a pajama party at midnight. At the
party, he tried to engage me in mathematical discussion.

We had a bit of a math kid's row there. I started grad school at age 16. My
roommate Ran Donagi started at 17. Ofer started at 16. I think they both were
a lot more accomplished in math on arrival than I was, however, so that makes
me the least precocious of the three of us. :) Perhaps not coincidentally, I'm
the one who didn't remain in mathematics.

~~~
DmZB
Please please please tell more Gabber and Donagi stories.

(Every time I stumbled upon an "unproved theorem of Gabber" in a paper, I
would take a screenshot and throw it into a folder.)

~~~
CurtMonash
Apparently the Putnam exam was given unofficially to Israelis, and both Ran
and Ofer finished top 10 -- in their mid-teens. By way of contrast, my best
finish was a little worse than 100th, when I was 14.

Ran was 3 years ahead of me, and pretty much the ideal roommate (my second
semester; I invited him to swap rooms with a first semester roommate I didn't
much get along with). No hassles about living conditions; some older-friend
general advice; a lot of help studying for my qualifying exams.

Ran had a sadness about him due to political controversy -- he had gotten a
special postponement of army duty due to his precociousness, he didn't want to
go back to fulfil his commitment, and orthodox Jewish department chair Shlomo
Sternberg pretty much expelled him (albeit with a PhD) in retaliation.

Of course, a much greater sadness later occurred in Ran's life, as his ex-wife
killed their child in a murder-suicide. :(

Ofer was a stereotypical geek; Ran was a more socially adept guy, with
girlfriends and so on. Not coincidentally, he spoke the much better English of
the two.

If we had a hierarchy of who was quickest and smartest in the department, the
top two were generally thought of as Ofer and Angelos Tsiromokos. In reality,
Don Coppersmith was right up there as well. Angelos of course is the one who
never got his PhD, instead going off to be a translator for the Common
Market/EU. But then, he could beat me at Scrabble, despite English being his
third language.

(On the other hand, Daniel Pipes, who briefly lived in my dorm, didn't take
kindly when a math guy -- me -- took him down at a word game. :) )

Ran told me of a multi-day conversation in which guys progressed through the
natural numbers, coming up with an interesting mathematical question to which
the number was the answer. I think they got stuck at 93 or so.

When we were in the common room, it somehow came up in conversation that
Jacobi was Jewish. I immediately said "Oh, THAT'S Jacobi's identity!" Angelos
literally fell out of his chair laughing.

------
dnautics
1) One of my high school buddies who went to the Courant institute for his
math Ph.D. defended his thesis and then it turned out his proof was one that
his own advisor had completed 10 years ago in a side note to a publication of
a bigger result. They still gave him the Ph.D. (and I think the advisor was
reprimanded); he wound up in finance.

2) Although I'm a biochemist, I did a math degree at the UofC - one memorable
lecture was the analysis class lecture where we proved that pi was irrational
(Professor Carlos Kenig). It started with the assertion, "assume pi is less
than 6". Then he said, "actually it doesn't really matter what the number is
it still works, I don't know how to count past 2, I'm sure 6 is big enough."

~~~
sp332
I'm surprised he can count to 2. In CS it's just 0, 1, infinity.

~~~
dnautics
He works in L2 spaces.

[http://math.uchicago.edu/~cek/bibliography.pdf](http://math.uchicago.edu/~cek/bibliography.pdf)

~~~
tomrod
That must be a difficult commute each day from R3 space.

------
DMac87
MathNews, UW Math department's student weekly newsletter, had/has a section
'profQuotes' \- just about the only part worth reading.. samples from this
week:

"Tragically, we will need to prove both cases. Fortunately, I can do one in
class and assign the other for homework."

"I’m sure you’re familiar with the proof technique I’ll use here... [writes
'Exercise' on the board]”

~~~
thisjepisje
What's their issue with pretzels? :P

------
jeremysalwen
Somewhat similar to some of the posted ones, my father relays me this story
about a professor he TA'd for:

The professor taught a class with a single student enrolled, who would
sometimes show up late. However, the professor would always start the lecture
on time regardless, and so the student would have to quickly take notes to
catch up. If the professor filled up the board before the student arrived, he
would simply begin overwriting the old material, and the student, once he
arrived, would be in a race with the professor to copy it down before it was
erased. One day, the student missed the class entirely, and the professor gave
the entire lecture to an empty room.

I thought this story was apocryphal, but my dad said it's likely true, as it
was fairly specific about this professor.

~~~
gchpaco
Not quite the same, but one of the math professors from my alma mater could
write faster on a blackboard than most people could write with pencil and
paper and was not shy about erasing when he filled up the board. It was always
crazy trying to keep up with him.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
I remember a prof, I think math, might have been physics (there was one guy in
the physics department whose MSc was in mathematical physics, was working on
his PhD, taught in both departments, and seems to my shaky memory to be the
best match for what happened) who actually had the eraser in the "other hand"
one day, applying it as he went. I think he was just excited, cannot remember
why. One or more us said something like "uh, professor...?", he noticed, put
down the eraser, and continued, somewhat sheepishly.

------
jimhefferon
I propose a new Law of SE: any topic of interest will eventually either get
rejected or locked for being historical only.

~~~
smeyer
That makes a lot of sense, right? Stack exchange is designed around making it
easy to find and get good answers to questions, not to have more involved or
less focused discussions, even if they're more interesting to read.

~~~
NotOscarWilde
The problem with this is the Law of Internet Monopolies (I just made the name
up): monopolies on the internet form very naturally and are tough to dissolve.

The sheer size of stackoverflow/mathoverflow means it attracts many
mathematicians in one place, unlike almost any other online forum I know. If
you restrict some subset of questions there, it is both impossible to look for
such questions elsewhere (nobody goes elsewhere) and to create a trivial fork
of mathoverflow where such questions are allowed (you'll never get critical
mass because people will not spend their time on two similar websites).

It's the same reason why nobody can create a better Wikipedia, no matter how
much pointless arguing is on the original and how clunky is the input editor.

\---

To sum up, restricting questions on MO actually _forbids_ such questions to be
asked by a large online mathematical community for a few years, until some
better Q&A forum appears. And that's what makes us upset, I think.

~~~
Vraxx
I recently had the experience of listening to Joel Spolsky talk on the subject
of seemingly arbitrary and unintuitive rules in large internet communities.
Basically what I gathered from it is that in order to keep the quality of the
content at a higher level, some of these rules are the best ways that this can
happen. Some of these rules sound dumb, but they come from the experience of
actually moderating very large communities and still trying to maintain focus
on the actual goal of the site. As for your concern on this seemingly
monopolizing the space of mathematicians I think this is untrue. If the demand
for a place to discuss this content exists enough to have a critical mass
community in the first place, surely it can exist outside of stack exchange.
There is no overlap there because that is not at all the same content that
stack exchange is hosting. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which I would
frequent one site to answer and receive answers on questions in mathematics,
but also frequent a board for casual community driven math topics.

~~~
NotOscarWilde
_> I recently had the experience of listening to Joel Spolsky talk on the
subject of seemingly arbitrary and unintuitive rules in large internet
communities. Basically what I gathered from it is that in order to keep the
quality of the content at a higher level, some of these rules are the best
ways that this can happen._

I understand the creators must have _done something right_ , but I believe it
is chiefly the tight UI (focus on questions instead of posts that get hidden
over time) along with the strong gamification (you get a lot of power if you
amass points) that kept the early adopters hooked, thereby gaining enough mass
for the site to become popular.

The tightness of the questions is for me just a quirk of the creators'
personalities. Look at Reddit -- also partially gamified, very loose with its
rules, and massively popular. If the rules were the magic that makes or breaks
fora, Reddit would never have made it.

 _> If the demand for a place to discuss this content exists enough to have a
critical mass community in the first place, surely it can exist outside of
stack exchange._

I disagree. If you look at this discussion and many others, you'll see people
expressing their discontent about questions being forced out of MO/SO. Do you
think the people that complain do not want such a place?

~~~
Vraxx
In response to the comment on Reddit, Joel mentioned this in one of his
points. His response related to the part where I mentioned maintaining a high
level of quality in the content. It's not that everything is bad on Reddit,
but it sure is easier to filter out the bad when we have these rules on what
belongs and what doesn't. In other words, things must be sacrificed if you
want to have lower troll density. Even HN has it's rules, even if they are
community driven at this point, but that's how many of these rules begin on
other sites (citing Joel's experiences with SO and his knowledge about
wikipedia).

I don't think casual fun interactions should be banned on the internet, it's
just more likely to involve undesirables that certain websites are a million
times more effective by avoiding. Imagine if you searched up a question on MO
or SO and the first number of responses were bloated indefinitely by other
answer threads discussing the topic, but maybe not in the same context, their
website becomes that much more ineffective for it's desired purpose.

As far as not seeing a place and the discussion on it, I think that is more
indicative of the fact that people would like a place, but nobody has been
particularly motivated enough to make it happen yet. Not to mention, at least
currently you can get a similar discussion by linking the historic thread on a
comments section with upvotes, so it seems another competitor for that
community would be sites like HN and Reddit rather than MO where you can't
post on it anymore.

Edited for spacing

------
AnimalMuppet
I've heard the one where the professor is lecturing, and says, "It's obvious
that..." A student challenges him: "Come on. Is it really obvious?" The
professor looks at the board for a moment, and then runs out of the room. 45
minutes later, the professor returns, and says, "Yes, it's obvious."

~~~
thisjepisje
Reminds me of this Feynman story:

[http://pastebin.com/rW2QU5k7](http://pastebin.com/rW2QU5k7)

 _“We have a new theorem–that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems,
because every theorem that’s proved is trivial.”_

Not very related perhaps but I think this is a great quote:

 _So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of
tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools
on it before giving the problem to me._

~~~
tomrod
I love this!

------
postit
Unfortunately I don't have any reputation on MO to post this story.

On the first math class during 5th grade our math teacher (who was giving her
first class after Graduation) spend about one hour talking about how
mathematics could be challenging and another hour talking about her thesis
(now I know, at time I wasn't understanding a shit)

Once she finished her non-sense lecture, she dictated us our home work.

"Go to the library and find what's Pie"

With a couple of classmates we spent our afternoon on the public library's
culinary section writing our essays about measuring pies.

------
KhalilK

       Here's another great one: a certain well known mathematican, we'll call him Professor P.T. (these are not his initials...), upon his arrival at Harvard University, was scheduled to teach Math 1a (the first semester of freshman calculus.) 
    
       He asked his fellow faculty members what he was supposed to teach in this course, and they told him: limits, continuity, differentiability, and a little bit of indefinite integration.
    
       The next day he came back and asked, "What am I supposed to cover in the second lecture?""
    

The funny thing about this is that we covered all of that in a total of 6
hours (2 hours per day) during my first year in CPGE.

~~~
final
The non-funny thing is 99.99999999% of people won't understand the basics of
calculus is such a time span.

~~~
KhalilK
That's when personal effort kicks in, 6 hours of courses followed by, say 18
hours of working on exercises, proofs and problems, will get you going.

------
wpietri
Hah. I thought: "That sounds like an interesting topic. How could it have
escaped Stack Overflow's ruthless prohibition against interesting reading?"
And of course it hasn't.

------
sdenton4
I was once taking a class with Csaba Szabo in Hungary, who, as usual, was
writing furiously on the board, when the quietest student in the class raised
her hand. Without turning around, Csaba yells, 'YES, QUESTION?!'

The girl says, 'Csaba, what's going on with you? You're always yelling, you
slam the boards down, throw chalk constantly... Last week you even broke a
window? Why are you so angry?'

Csaba responds, 'Yes, yes, angry always. A storm is coming, and algebra is the
thunder!'

------
thelogos
It boils my blood every time that I come across an interesting topic on SO
just to see it locked. Something is wrong with the site when you see more
topics locked than open.

~~~
anon4
Locked is all right, maybe it has the answer you're looking for. The shitty
part is when you get a hit from google going to SO and the SO page is
_deleted_ because "this problem is too localised and unlikely to happen
twice".

~~~
pervycreeper
This is a trend in Google search results for forum threads. Especially common
(and frustrating) is getting a link to a locked thread with a single response
telling the OP to search for the answer to their question.

------
ssw1n
There is this no nonsense, star faculty in the department where I did my
undergrad.

Urban Legend in the department says that in one of the offerings of his
classes, there was this smug student, who would chime in, and comment on the
material being presented at every chance he got.

One day, while the faculty was presenting a particularly tough topic material
to the class, the smug student raised his hand and asked, "Would it be OK if I
ask a stupid question?"

The faculty looked at the student's face, grinned and said, "It is perfectly
fine. After all, there is nothing such as stupid question." He paused for a
bit, and then completed his sentence. "But there is only such a thing as
stupid student."

------
rolha
In the same vein:

In my Physics undergrad, a teacher called a friend of mine to the board and
asked him to write Snell's law.

He picked up the chalk and wrote "Snell's law".

~~~
JadeNB
This sounds like a parable for CS about the importance of quoting.

------
raldi
Can someone explain the introductory story? Why is it significant that the
spaces were finite?

~~~
g33n
From my recollection of topology, finite spaces are mostly useful as
demonstrations or counter-examples. So, to illustrate a point about why
something isn't true, you might break out a finite space to provide an easy-
to-understand means of grasping the counter-example (there's an entire book
called _Counterexamples in Topology_ for this purpose).

"Real work" in topology generally involves infinite spaces, though.

