Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Sunday, March 25, 2018

J. SMITH and Miss Jane DOE

Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge consisted of courses at the first year graduate level.

Early in my first term, an attendance sheet was passed around in each course.

The first time I got such a sheet, I wrote "A. SILVERBERG", using the same format as those who signed before me, and passed it to the students behind me.

Sometime later, I realized that a young man was towering over me. He had come up behind me, from the back of the classroom. 

He placed the attendance sheet on my desk and said "You haven't put your name on this."

Was he hitting on me, and wanted to know my name?

I said "Yes, I have," and pointed to my name.

The young man turned bright red with embarrassment, and retreated with the sheet.

In a different course later in the week, the other woman who was taking some of the Pure Mathematics Part III courses got the sheet before I did. She wrote "Miss Sarah REES". I realized that the young man assumed I hadn't put my name because there were no names in the format "Miss Alice SILVERBERG".

I decided that I probably wouldn't like Miss Sarah Rees, and we wouldn't have anything in common. I was very wrong!

I eventually got used to these lists of names. When the Churchill College students had to sign up with a doctor under the National Health Service, the list of available doctors was in the format "J. SMITH" for the male doctors and "Miss Jane DOE" or "Mrs. Jane DOE" for the female doctors. Or maybe it was "Dr. J. SMITH" for the men. I never understood why we needed to know the marital status and first names of the women, but not the men.