3 ms·

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 fo

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
  - thisjepisje 12y ago
    I'm not familiar with any of the people mentioned, but could you elaborate a bit on the unproved theorems? Were they generally supposed to be true?
CurtMonash 12y ago
David Kazhdan's English was so bad when he first arrived at Harvard that people kept dropping out of his class. Finally there were about two left, both of whom understood Russian, and he changed languages and conducted class in that language.
CurtMonash 12y ago
And in an economics seminar, a graduate student made the claim "It is axiomatic that if there are more possible outcomes to a negotiation, it is easier to achieve a result." This is in fact nonsense, as can easily be seen by considering cases in which the set of all possible outcomes has cardinality 1. And so I said "It may be axiomatic, but it also happens to be incorrect."
- CurtMonash 12y ago
  Relevant to the previous anecdote is that, as a game theorist, I of course had read and thought a fair amount about negotiation.

CurtMonash 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- thisjepisje 12y ago
  I'm not familiar with any of the people mentioned, but could you elaborate a bit on the unproved theorems? Were they generally supposed to be true?

CurtMonash 12y ago

David Kazhdan's English was so bad when he first arrived at Harvard that people kept dropping out of his class. Finally there were about two left, both of whom understood Russian, and he changed languages and conducted class in that language.

CurtMonash 12y ago

And in an economics seminar, a graduate student made the claim "It is axiomatic that if there are more possible outcomes to a negotiation, it is easier to achieve a result." This is in fact nonsense, as can easily be seen by considering cases in which the set of all possible outcomes has cardinality 1. And so I said "It may be axiomatic, but it also happens to be incorrect."

CurtMonash 12y ago
Relevant to the previous anecdote is that, as a game theorist, I of course had read and thought a fair amount about negotiation.