You have psychological problems

Something on CM last week made me think of my PhD adviser.  I haven’t talked to him in years, but I’ve promised myself I won’t miss his next birthday conference (or retirement bash, when that happens.)  In my experience mathematicians—especially the good ones--among themselves are direct to the point of bluntness, a quality I find refreshing, but which unfortunately we have to repress in most professional situations.  Being a great man, he never had this problem:

This theorem is too good for you.

This after I had been working on a problem for five months. It was something very topical at the time, and I had the idea of approaching it using techniques from a former mathematical life, which he knew zip about. So I stopped him in the hallway one day (you had to do that) and showed him my idea for a solution; I just had to check some estimates. After hearing me out for five minutes, out came the encouraging words.  In a way, he was right; I never found a way to get enough uniformity with that method.  And neither has anyone else, in the roughly thirty years since; the problem was eventually solved (in a sense) years later, with techniques from a different area of mathematics. I say “in a sense” since some of those techniques are a little hocus pocus for my taste. But the whole area is no longer “topical”, so it doesn’t matter.

You only want to work on famous problems.

Isn’t that what ambitious graduate students are supposed to do? This was the early 1980s, a lot of exciting things were happening in the area.  I kept reading these preprints on really interesting new mathematics, with clearly a lot of room for growth, and naturally tried to find a doable problem along those lines. He wouldn’t hear of it, insisting instead I work in a class of problems that, by comparison, seemed almost “technical”. Eventually I got frustrated at seeing other students in the same group work on the flashy stuff with other advisers, and tried to switch to someone else (one of his friends).  This led to:

You have psychological problems.

And well, maybe in a way he was right! But in precisely what sense would only come to light years later (and it is a good kind of “problem”, once it is solved.)  The other students, by the way, have not fared that much better (with one exception) in terms of difficult theorems, but are certainly in “flashier” places. So I kept working on the same topic, and that led to a thesis, and later even to a surprising result. But it is not surprising that at one point I heard:

You are not very enthusiastic.

(Again, I have come to understand that was a very perceptive remark--I am wholly unable to feign enthusiasm for something when I don't feel it, and I feel it rarely--but that's a topic for another post.)

At around the same time, he became very upset with the department chair. One day at a party with colleagues and graduate students in his research group he uttered the unforgettable:

Yesterday he little shit. Today he chairman. Tomorrow, he will be little shit again!

(Comforting words to recall when I'm feeling harassed by my department head.)

Not even cuddly animals were spared. At another party years later, a generally beloved threatened species with very particular dietary habits came up. Not an issue for him:

Picky eaters deserve to die!

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In anyone else, it might be taken as arrogance, or insensitivity; and maybe it is. But knowing him, I think comes from a place of utter honesty; a certain purity, even.  Even when he's being a little too aggressive in the pursuit of his goals, it is done openly, without subterfuge. I have a lot of respect for that.