Alice's Adventures in Numberland

My father never phoned me, so when I got a phone call from him during my last year in graduate school, I knew it must be important. "Yo...

X and I hadn't seen each other since we were in grad school together. We were standing around with a couple of graduate students during ...

During a conversation with C in a hallway after lunch, he yelled at me, "Stop interrupting me! You're always interrupting!"  I...

I know of a cohort that was chosen (from paper applications without interviews) by a well-intentioned selection committee that tried to put ...

While I was an assistant professor, I was asked if I wanted to be considered for a position at Bandersnatch University, and I said OK. I got...

My friend E grew up in Europe, but went to a large American university for grad school. She carefully observed the other grad students, to l...

When I was in my freshman year of college, a friend mentioned the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality. I asked, "What's that?...

At Harvard in the 1970s, I was accustomed to seeing funding opportunities that were only open to men . It was unusual to see something open ...

My recollection is that when I got into Radcliffe, students who were admitted to Harvard and Radcliffe were sent a thick booklet that listed...

"I'm so nervous! There are so many people in the audience! You must be really nervous!" said the Associate Dean who was abou...

Very early one Saturday morning in the fall of 1979 I woke to my alarm and looked out the window at the pouring rain. Should I cycle to Alan...

As the know-it-all American, I came up with a list of ways to make life better for the students doing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos (a...

At "morning coffee" one day in November of 1979, I taught a shy PhD student how to play backgammon. That was a daring thing to do ...

When I spent a year as a student at the University of Cambridge, I took an Algebraic Topology course from Frank Adams. During one class, Ada...

On my way from Como to Rome in September of 1979, I had to change trains in Milan. From riding the New York City subway in the early 1970s, ...

Click the play button for the audio version: I had heard that Lake Como was beautiful. So after an unexpected three-week interregnum in Hei...

The announcement came over the PA system at Logan Airport on the last day of July in 1979 as the planeload of people waited at the gate, whe...

When I was growing up, I learned on my mother's knee a song she had learned from her mother. It was sung to the same tune as Hatikvah, b...

A small group of faculty, staff, and visiting faculty was having lunch in the dining hall of a Harvard dorm one day in 1990, while I was vis...

(This story hearkens back to Staff with Forks .) D was a nice, highly competent member of the Math Department staff. She was so conscientiou...

At a parent-teacher conference when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mother that I would burn in Hell since I didn't believe in ...

It looked a bit like a large tombstone. Each time I passed it as I biked down a side street during my stay in Erlangen, Germany, I wondered ...