Son #1 sent me an article about cranks, people who hold strong, contrarian positions. The focus of the article was mathematical cranks, those who insist that they have solutions to mathematical problems known to have no solution. I especially enjoyed The Crank Index in the article, attributed to mathematician Chris Caldwell. Caldwell studies prime numbers, […]
Goals. Check!
Walking in my neighborhood, I saw this stray sheet of notepad paper. I love this list. This is now my list, and I can honestly report that I have accomplished everything on it.
Fall Sabbatical: Home Again, Again
For now, my parents still live in my childhood home, and I think about what it means to “go home again” when I visit there. This month, I am enjoying a different version of going home again. I am on sabbatical for the semester in Somerville, MA, living around the corner from where I lived […]
Arrivederci Professor Forni
There was an obituary in The Wall Street Journal for one Professor Pier Massimo Forni, “a poet and scholar of Italian literature.” I found this guy to be an interesting choice for coverage in a newspaper focused on business. Usually the obituaries in the WSJ are about people who influenced the economy. So how did […]
The No Worries Cafe is Closed
I once ate a meal at a restaurant called The No Worries Cafe. The meal was during a period in my life when I really needed a moment of no worries. Wishful thinking, I suppose, led me there. I discovered the closure when I was writing my blog post about living on the sunny side […]
Stay a Virgin As Long As You Can
When my boys were little, I attended a dinner party at the home of an older colleague. The older colleague is 30 years older than me, a full generation ahead. This man is someone I respect immensely, as much for his warm and accepting way with his family as for his professional accomplishments. Wine was […]
Be a Rainbow
Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Maya Angelou A thought (from Pinterest, where else?) on a snowy May day in Colorado.
Sunny Side of the Street
The other day it occurred to me that I live on the sunny side of the street. But only literally. Our house faces south. In the suburban wilds of California where I grew up, we had no need for the compass. Here in Colorado, I can north-south-east-west with the best of them (or at least […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Bureaucracy (Feynman Part 3)
This post is the third and final in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The first posts covered two different reactions I had to the book: indignation and inspiration. In this post, I describe a third reaction, empathetic amusement—on the topic […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Research (Feynman Part 2)
This post is the second in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the previous post, I had my dander up about Professor Feynman’s ogling of the co-eds. I can see that his creepiness was a distraction—for him and for me—from […]