"Now I understand why it's trivial"

I first heard about R in the Princeton math department Common Room, when the head of the graduate admissions committee told a group of us about the students who applied that year. He said that R's application was amazing, with glowing, over-the-top letters of recommendation.

R was incredibly clever. So clever, that whenever I told him about a theorem I had proved, he immediately informed me that my result was trivial and the proof was obvious.

After R became a professor, he invited me to give a seminar talk at his university. I wondered why he had invited me, if he thought that everything I did was trivial. I decided to use the talk as an opportunity to prove to R that I could do something that wasn't obvious. So I chose to talk about a problem a co-author and I had solved where the answer was unexpected. The proof wasn't hard, but it wasn't obvious; it was a little tricky.

During my talk I asked the mathematical question, and before I gave our answer I polled the audience as to their guesses for the answer. The question was whether a certain set associated to an elliptic curve is always infinite, always finite, or whether it depends on the curve, and in that case, with what distribution? Everyone except R ventured a guess. I prodded R to commit to an answer. I wasn't going to let him off the hook. He said he had no idea. When I (rather unfairly) pressed him further, he gave a wrong guess.

At the dinner after the talk, I explained to R that I had noticed that R invariably told me my work was trivial and obvious, and that my talk was a set-up designed to prove to him that not everything I did was trivial.

R told his side of the story, which was that once he understood a proof, even one he had come up with himself, it seemed to him as if it should have always been obvious, and anyone (including himself) to whom it wasn't obvious was just being stupid. 

At the end of the dinner, R turned to me and in all seriousness remarked "Now I understand why it's trivial." I burst out laughing. R had thought about the result during the dinner, and now believed it was trivial. I wish I had asked him to elaborate, since he might have found a more conceptual proof, and I would have learned something from it.

While I had always liked R, despite his snap judgments of my work, my feelings towards him got much warmer due to a conversation we had after I moved to Orange County, California. I ran into him at the annual math meeting, and complained about my difficulty adjusting to the SoCal culture. I told him how I had been part of several small social groups for years, and yet some of the people didn't know my name, and the ones who did usually didn't care enough to even say "I noticed you haven't been coming here for the past year. We missed you. I hope everything was OK." They didn't seem to care whether I was alive or dead. In a very heartfelt way, R told me, "If you died, I would care, and it would make me very sad." It was a sweet thing to say, and reminded me that mathematicians, for all our flaws, are a community of people who care about each other.

The Threat

I was seated next to the university President at dinner, when I visited a large state university. A Dean sat across from us. The President and Dean were talking about people and university politics that I and others at the table weren't familiar with. The rest of us sat quietly, and felt left out. Trying to transform the conversation into something of interest to all of us, I began to ask questions.

The President and Dean were heatedly regaling us with the crimes of a Professor who represented the faculty union. The President claimed that the Professor had threatened her, and that his behavior was unreasonable, unethical, and illegal. I asked for details.

The threat was that if the university didn't do something that the union wanted, he would tell the faculty about it.

That was the "threat"? The President explained that by threatening to tell the faculty that she wasn't meeting his demands, the Professor was threatening her. She took it personally, and she was outraged.

I told the President that if I were her, I would be glad to know what would happen if I didn't do what the union wanted. To me, it didn't seem like a dangerous threat, it seemed like useful information that could inform her decision. He was simply pointing out what leverage he had. I thought she should be grateful to him, rather than angry.

But the President had become so invested in demonizing the Professor, that she wasn't willing to try to see things any other way.

A Tribute to John Hsia

My Ohio State University colleague John Hsia recently passed away. John was very kind to me. He was generous and nice.

Here's one example of his generosity and kindness. When I arrived at OSU, one of the Vice Chairs assigned me a horrid interior office with a connecting hole to the men's room (see the November 5, 2018 story). After I put up with it for most of an academic year, near the beginning of spring quarter John presented me with a key. Our colleague Joe Neisendorfer was taking a new job at the University of Rochester, to start in the fall. Joe wasn't teaching in the spring quarter, and had moved out of his office early. John suspected that I would stay in my vent-for-the-men's-room office forever, if we left it up to the Vice Chair (who seemed to relish demonstrating his power over me---stories for another day). John took pity on me, and asked Joe to give him his office key, so that John could give it to me. Joe kindly agreed, and I moved into his office before the Vice Chair could assign it to anyone else. The Vice Chair hated me for it, since we had gone around him. But it was worth it to get a room with a view (and no men's room fumes).

If only there were more people like John Hsia.