Very late update: Courtesy of Deb Piranian -- daughter of the great man, designer of the T-shirt in question, and a scholar in her own right -- I've made corrections. It's important to tell the man's story accurately. Accuracy was one of his hallmarks.
The confluence of events this weekend makes for an interesting interconnected web of thoughts. It's going to take multiple posts to tie them all together. This is the first.
Query: what do Martin and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) have in common?
[Insert theme from Jeopardy here. Also insert some cheap jokes from my good friends, I'm sure.]
No, it's not "blowing things up". While I got good grades in high school chemistry, it's really not a subject that ever got through to me. I may
know people who can make bombs out of common household items (BCL, DB, RAM, CW, MB, DJ, TL, DL, and JN, just to drop a few initials); but aside from mixing hydrogen and oxygen to make a big wet boom, I'm explosive impaired.
No, it's not living in isolated cabins in the woods. And it's not writing long, rambling nonsense screeds. (Do blog posts count?)
Time's up! The answer is that not only did we both attend the University of Michigan (a generation apart), but we both had the same math instructor: Professor George Piranian.
Now it's safe to say that we weren't in the same league. By George's own words (I wish I could bring myself to use the respectful name, as is my usual blog habit; but darn it, he connected with you, and you just had to call him George), Mr. Kaczynski was smarter than him. Mr. Kaczynski made his mark at U of M by solving in under a year a complex problem that had eluded George.
I, meanwhile, was horribly underprepared for advanced college calculus. My high school offered six weeks of pre-calc at the end of senior year. At U of M, there was Math 115, Intro to Calc; and there was Math 185, Honors Calc; and then there was Math 195, simply Honors Math, but dubbed "Math for the Gods". There was no way I was ready for Math 195; and I wouldn't have made it through without one of those sets of initials above helping me out (Mr. "My high school offered two years of calc, and so I placed out of this requirement, but I'm taking it anyway — because of George"). But when I
did learn something in that class, I
learned it at a deep, fundamental level that gave me a glimpse of real, underlying order in the universe that still astonishes me today. And that was because of George: a renaissance scholar who was as at home climbing the Alps as in a class room (and who usually came to class in his hiking shorts, T-shirt, and hiking boots)... A
Bavarian Swiss gentleman who, with his wife, was a ballistics computer for the Allies back in WWII (that's an old, seldom heard usage of "computer" from back in the day)... And a man who made his students care about math.
But it almost wasn't like that. The year before I arrived at U of M, Math 195 under the previous instructor had a different approach: "If Math 185 students are going through chapters twice as fast as Math 115 students, then Math 195 students should go through them
three times as fast. They should do at least a chapter a night, plus homework problems, and more." And so, sometime in early 1981, the Math department met to discuss canceling Math 195/196 all together. See, in the Fall 1980 class, 9 students ignored the horror stories of Math 195 and signed up. Three of them made it to the end of the semester. One of them signed up for Math 196. He quit half-way through. Students decided it was just too hard; and worse, it was destroying their GPAs, when those same students could've just as easily taken 185/186 or even 115/116 and aced the classes, doing wonders for their GPAs. Consensus in the department was that the class was doomed.
But George said, "Wait!" He said, "Slow down. Don't give them more work;
teach them more. In 115 and 185, students just learn to apply formulae. They learn how. In 195, they should learn
why. They should come out of that class with a deeper understanding of where math comes from, how it's discovered, and why it matters."
And the department collectively looked at him, and said, "Fine, George.
You teach it."
And that was the explanation for the famous T-shirt; and fool that I am, I was gullible enough to feed him the straight line. See, as part of his quest to expose the 195 students to mathematics the discipline rather than just a collection of formulae, he hosted a wine and cheese party for the two sections of 195 students to get to know each other and the math department. Uncharacteristically for me, I went to the party. I and the explosives expert put on our finest duds to go to this big department affair.
And there, sure enough, was George: hiking shorts, hiking boots, and T-shirt among all those dressed up students trying nervously to not embarrass themselves among the grown-ups. And sooner or later, as these affairs go, we circulated over for "our turn" talking with George and his peers. And I saw that his T-shirt was even more unusual than usual, in that I couldn't even recognize the language of the message that was written on it. So when it came my turn to make small talk, I commented on the T-shirt, and admitted that I couldn't make out the language. That was the straight line he was waiting for. "It's
Sanskrit Glagolitic," he said, knowing he was likely the only one in the room who could read
Sanskrit Glagolitic. "It means, 'I have fallen into the hole that I have dug for myself.'"
And then he looked me straight in the eye with a piercing stare that still sticks in my mind today, and said, "That means I'm teaching Math 195." And then that rolling,
Bavarian Swiss cackle washed over the room.
And he did it. I mean, he really, really did it. I was just not prepared for that class. It probably set me back on learning calculus, really. I could've been a star in 115, or even 185. But what I learned, I
understood, thanks to George. I have a gut feel for continuity and what derivatives mean and why and how we discovered them that I think serves me much better than any memorized plug-and-chug techniques could do. I have learned how math induction gives us a grasp on infinity. I have some grasp of the different kinds of infinities, and why it's not nonsense to talk about one kind of infinity being larger than another. I have an understanding of functions that no computer programming class can ever touch.
So that's my brush with greatness. Oh, not Mr. Kaczynski, whom I never met and whom I could never consider great. He's just a hook I use to get people listening so I can talk about George Piranian. Human computer. Mountaineer. Hiker. War hero. Comedian.
Teacher. And it doesn't get greater than that.
