Wives with Knives

In the spirit of "bluff the listener" games, which story do you think is true (except for obvious name changes)?

Story #1:

While I was visiting a university in Australia, I ran into a mathematician I knew, who offered to take me on a hike in the countryside. Eager to get outside the city, I agreed. After the hike, he took me to his girlfriend's house, where she was preparing a barbecue for her adult children and children-in-law. The girlfriend wasn't expecting me, but she graciously welcomed me in, and treated me kindly.

Eventually, I picked up a vibe that led me to wonder whether the girlfriend was concerned that my colleague was going to leave her for me. She was considerably older than my colleague, while I was younger than him. Though she never said anything explicit about it, she seemed rather wistful. I never found a good way to let her know that she had nothing to worry about.

When I mentioned that I was having a lot of trouble getting over the jetlag from my flight from North America, she insisted on giving me a few of what she said were prescription sleeping pills. I tried to refuse, but she insisted that I take them.

That night, back at my lodging, I wondered to what lengths someone would go, to hold onto her lover. The girlfriend had been very nice to me, but she very much loved my colleague. My paranoia undoubtedly came from accumulated sleep deprivation, but in an overabundance of caution I flushed the sleeping pills down the toilet.

Story #2:

I was invited to give a talk at an American university. My host was someone I didn't know, whom I'll call Dr. Clueless. The night before my talk, Clueless kindly drove me to his home so his wife could give me a homecooked dinner. On the drive there, I asked if his wife knew I was coming to dinner. He said no, but assured me that she wouldn't mind.

In fact, she did mind. Their teenage daughter was going through a typical teenage crisis. The daughter was mortified that a stranger was there to see her in tears.

Clueless offered to make me a screwdriver. I told him I rarely drank alcohol, but I could try it, if he used only a trace of vodka. He promised me he would. From the fact that I could taste the alcohol in the orange juice (which he had assured me wouldn't happen), and the size of my hangover the next day, I wondered whether he had switched our drinks.

Clueless's wife, exasperated with her husband and with his expectation that she would play the docile happy housewife, bundled the daughter into her car, so they could discuss the daughter's troubles in private. (I would have offered to leave, but I didn't realize they were going until after they'd left.)

Left to fend for ourselves, Clueless eventually managed to scrounge up some grub for us, and then drove me to the dorm I was put up in. My talk the next day was probably not improved by the hangover, but I mercifully have no memory of it.

Story #3:

The chair of the math department at Lobster Quadrille University contacted me to ask if I'd like a job there. He said it would be a full professor position, which seemed premature to me since I had only recently been promoted to associate professor. I pointed out that I had never paid a professional visit there, and didn't know the university or the town, so he invited me out there.

During my visit, one of the faculty, Professor Also Clueless (no relation), kindly took me for a drive to show me around. Afterwards, we stopped at his house and waited in the kitchen for his wife to arrive. It turned out that he expected her to make us lunch.

When Also's wife returned home, she was surprised and angry with Also's thoughtlessness. She was in the midst of a busy day, that among other things included numerous and complex demands of a full-time job with significant responsibilities, and the care of their young child.

It was one of the nicest, best equipped kitchens I'd every seen. Copper pots and pans hung from above. Also's wife stood next to a very impressive array of butcher knives. I was seated in a direct line between the two of them. As Also's wife's voice grew angrier, I thought about those knives. I wasn't worried that she would aim them at me; she didn't view me as the one to blame. I was afraid that she'd start hurling knives at her husband, and I'd be caught in the line of fire. As they argued, I tried to silence my growling stomach so I could quietly and unobtrusively slip out of the kitchen and into the safety of the living room.

If I recall correctly, Also and I drove around for awhile until we eventually found a store where I could grab a sandwich for a very late lunch.

As for Lobster Quadrille University, after considerable delay I received a rather cold rejection letter from the department chair. It felt odd to get a rejection letter for a job to which I hadn't actually applied.

Which story really happened? All of them.

When will we learn not to name things after people?

Personally, I think that naming things after people is a bad idea. I also don't think we should glorify people by erecting statues of them, as if they were gods.

People are flawed. We all have good points and bad points. We've all done good things and bad things. And an action that I think is good, you might think is bad.

Who gets put on a pedestal, and why? Who gets taken off a pedestal, and why? Who decides?

Rather than arguing about whether to call a certain mathematics conjecture the Weil Conjecture, or the Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, or the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture, or the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, why not call it the Modularity Conjecture? That's more informative. Or call it the conjecture (or theorem) that every elliptic curve over the rationals is modular. That's an efficient way to give precise and useful information.

If you can, come up with a pithy term that helps to convey what it does. My friends just laugh at me when I suggest that we call the Chinese Remainder Theorem the Leftover Things Theorem, but surely one can come up with a more informative name, rather than quarreling about the origin of the result. For example, "Unique Factorization Theorem" is a more helpful name than the "Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic".

In an online discussion about possible names for some new streets in university housing, an Asian-American professor thought that there should be more streets with Asian names, and gave some suggestions, perhaps the most clever of which was to name a street Wang Wei. Others thought there should be more names of women. Someone noted a lack of streets named after Asian filmmakers and gave a few helpful suggestions, while another added an Asian lesbian. Someone was unhappy that an existing street was named after a man who had worked on uranium enrichment. There was a request for more pop stars. Some people pointed out that no streets in the neighborhood were named after Jews. Another was concerned about the lack of Polish, Czech, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and German names. An Armenian-American offered a list of famous Armenians. And another professor suggested the name of one of his relatives.

When someone suggested "Miles", someone else countered with Billie Holiday. The Miles backer argued that Holiday wasn't at the level of "Miles". This led to some pushback. It was then pointed out that Miles Davis's life had some significant problematic aspects, including violence towards women.

At one point, the person who had (half-jokingly) started it all, asked "couldn't we just have numbers?" That seemed quite sensible. Numbers or letters sound fine to me! (I grew up on a street in Queens whose name was a 3-digit number.)

It turned out that city rules had declared both numerical and alphabetical street names to be "unacceptable". In addition, street names were restricted to at most three syllables per word (though the neighborhood already had street names that violated that provision), and six syllables total, and had to be easy to pronounce and spell. Some neighbors pointed out that this produces a demographically narrow result.

In some places the streets are named after trees, flowers, or birds, in helpful alphabetical order. Isn't that lovely? Elm, Oak, and Pine are easy to spell and pronounce.

I never learned anything about Martin van Buren in school, even though my high school was named after him. It was only years later that I learned that he was considered to be one of the worst presidents. It would be fun to have a naming contest, to rename the school after something that isn't a person.

I was glad to see someone call (in a New York Times opinion piece) for her own late grandfather to be stripped of honors, due to his war crimes. She pointed out that a person can do both great things and terrible things during one lifetime, and it's important to "accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can coexist."

If we're going to name buildings and programs after donors (or the donors' favorite people), we could at least make it clear that it's not an endorsement of the donors' ethical values or approval of everything they have done, it's just a self-interested need for funding.

Why not name buildings or streets after higher principles, such as Truth, Beauty, Hope, Love, and Kindness?

For a university, I can imagine streets named Art, Chemistry, Dance, Engineering, History, Mathematics, and Philosophy. (We're treading on some risky turf, with those four-syllable words.) Or a mathematically-themed segment could have Algebra Avenue, Geometry Road, and Topology Path. Though I can well imagine math departments fighting over which areas of mathematics are important enough to be street names, how finely to subdivide the areas of mathematics, and whether more streets should be named after subfields of pure mathematics or applied mathematics.

Perhaps there's little we can fully agree on. But can we agree that naming things after people is problematic?