Law and Definitions
Emeritus Professor Cecil Law died last week , and flags at Queen’s are at half-mast until tomorrow. He had served as acting head of what is now the School of Computing during the search for the first capital-H Head in 1969. I never met him (likely because of geekish lack of attention to professional networking); I had plenty of time to do so (he retired from the School of Business eight years after I arrived in what was then the Department of Computing and Information Science ), and he would have been worth knowing. Prof. Law was more into operations research and business than what we’d now consider the core of computing, but his association with the Department led to his serving on quite a few Master’s degree examinations – where the other members usually conspired not to warn the candidate about his standard question:
Free to Play
In grad school I had a group of friends who liked to relax on Friday evenings by playing board games and role-playing games Apparently that alone made us geeks, even if most of us hadn’t also been studying computer science and engineering.
Word Problems
Back in grade school (long enough ago I don’t remember which grade), most of my classmates hated “word problems” — things like
That’s a paraphrase of a GMAT prep site (which I’m not criticising at all, since it’s exactly the sort of thing you need to be able to do for the GMAT (which I’m also not criticising at all)). When I started teaching introductory programming in the 1980’s, a lot of problems we set were of the same sort: Here’s a very simple problem you care nothing about that you have to solve in a particular way because there’s one basic technique we want you to learn. For the math-talented, solving the equations was easy, but they hated translating the words into the equations. For the math-impaired, the equations were boring or scary and the “story” wasn’t the least bit compelling.
I think we can do a lot better.
Legacy
I’ve never met Michael Spivak , so don’t know much about him, personally, but I think many people would consider him a geek. He is a calculus professor whose textbook was widely adopted for many years; two classmates of mine in grad school, from widely separated parts of the USA, had used it. If that wasn’t enough to qualify him, consider this: Many geeks like to take things apart, see how they work, and put them together in a different way. Spivak’s research field is differential geometry , which uses calculus and algebra to study geometry. Not quite like taking apart a streetcar to make a rocket sled , but still in the spirit of geekitude. He also wrote a guide to using TeX , an enormously complex and hard-to-learn text formatter aimed at getting every black spot of a mathematical formula in exactly the right place.
He also displays the kind of quirky I-don’t-care-what-others-think attitude some geeks have. In the front matter of that textbook appears the phrase “Dedicated to the memory of y.p.” If you look in the index, you might trip across the entry ” Pig, yellow” There are only three references: to the dedication page, to the index page ( self-reference being a favourite thing of many math geeks), and to a page in the middle of the text that does not contain the phrase “yellow pig”. You have to apply abstraction, another math geek thing, to realize that “whole hog” counts. That guide I mentioned above was called ” The Joy of TeX ,” a similarly quirky name to call a technical manual.
I’d like to think Spivak will be remembered for a long time — and since he was born in the 1940’s he likely has some good years left. His whole body of academic work counts as a good legacy among geeks, but textbooks go out of fashion, and the undergraduates you mentored go on to other things. I wonder if Spivak might actually be remembered longer for something that has nothing to do with mathematics.