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, October 10, 2021

"But there's only one door!"

In June of 1981, John Tate gave Larry Washington, K, and me a ride from Paris to the new mathematics conference center in Luminy, on the south coast of France. Larry was navigating. When we got lost in Marseille, I had the sinking feeling, "Oh my God! Larry is holding the map upside down! He doesn't have any sense of direction! We're going to spend the rest of our lives going in circles in Marseille!" I wrested the map out of Larry's hands. (Larry's rebuttal is: "Yes, we missed a turn and ended up down by the docks. We were going south, so I was holding the map upside down in order to orient it with the direction we were going. I was trying to figure things out, but you took the map from me. I would have gotten us out, but you were impatient." He's probably right on all counts!)

The building we were housed in was in the process of being renovated, and I remember the toilets overflowing and flooding the floors.

When we arrived, we found the caretaker and asked for our keys. 

K and I were sharing a room, and the caretaker wanted us to share a key.

It was clear to us Americans what was wrong with that plan, and that independent people should have their own keys so they could come and go as they pleased. John Tate tried to explain this to the caretaker.

John translated the caretaker's response for us: 
             "Why do they need two keys? There's only one door!"

John thought this answer was quite funny, and over the years he enjoyed reminding me of it, by saying emphatically, "But there's only one door!"

John rummaged around in the key box on the caretaker's desk, and found a second key to the room. The caretaker didn't know what to do about it, so he didn't stop him. He probably didn't feel comfortable stopping a senior professor from taking the key.

I was reminded of this story in 1995, when I asked Elham Izadi to share a hotel room in Utrecht during the Frans Oort 60th birthday conference. I had been staying in Europe, and Elham arrived jetlagged from the U.S., so we had very different sleep schedules. The hotel staff made us share a key, and pointed out that we could leave it at the front desk when we weren't in the room, so the other person could pick it up. But that didn't help us when one of us was asleep (with the key) in our hotel room, or showering, and the other needed to get in.