Urban Tale free12/30/2023 ![]() ![]() He is coming back from a conference, where he presented some exciting results of his Ph.D. This happened just last year, but it certainly deserves to be included in the annals of mathematical legends:Ī graduate student (let's call him Saeed) is in the airport standing in a security line. The student was failed, since he was obviously not a physicist. Student: Umm, don't know, I just know $k\dots$ (b) what stories kept you awake at night as a graduate student, and is there any evidence for or against their truth?ĮDIT (this is unrelated, but I don't want to answer my own question too many times): At Princeton, there was supposedly an FPO in Physics, on some sort of statistical mechanics, and the constant $k$ appeared many times. So, the questions are: (a) any direct evidence for or against this particular disaster? But now, I have talked to a couple of topologists who should have been there at the time of the event, and they told me that this was an urban legend at their time as well, so maybe the faculty member was pulling my leg. I had assumed this was an "urban legend", but then at a cocktail party, I mentioned this to a faculty member, who turned crimson and said that this was one of his students, who never talked to him, and then had to write another thesis (in numerical analysis, which was not very highly regarded at Princeton at the time). When I was a young and impressionable graduate student at Princeton, we scared each other with the story of a Final Public Oral, where Jack Milnor was dragged in against his will to sit on a committee, and noted that the class of topological spaces discussed by the speaker consisted of finite spaces. ![]() It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions. This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. ![]()
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